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LakiSoft

Source port idea!

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printz said:

I don't find the looming control of closed software so dangerous. If a company's services become detrimental, we can always boycott their services, choosing a better competitor.

When was the last time that actually worked? Once something has enough market penetration and its brand awareness has reached culture saturation (ie. people regard that product and its company as if they are a fundamental part of life itself), boycotts mean nothing. You end up being a few nerds being nerdy while the mass of the human race laughs at you.

Better to take an ideological stand from the beginning while it can still accomplish something than to wait til you're behind prison bars and saying something will get your head smashed in by the guards.

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Sure, boycott in its best known sense (WOOO I REFUSE TO USE THIS ON PRINCIPLE) is stupid and ineffective. I should have worded it better. I mean simply avoiding a bad product and choosing a better one. Much more realistic, and it's what I actually meant.

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printz said:
Much more realistic, and it's what I actually meant.

You're confused. Quasar understood what you meant by boycott and addressed your idea. Consumers are fragmented masses of people who can't really spearhead such product choices en masse. That idea just means throwing the ball on customers as an excuse to do nothing.

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printz said:

The BSD operating systems.


By "viable" I intended to imply "more than 30 people use them". While that's somewhat hyperbolic, I think there are strong reasons why the BSDs are less popular than Linux, the main reason being the GPL.

printz said:

There's obviously more freedom for the developer if, in addition to the code being reusable, it can also be closed and used together with other code that for any reason needs to be closed.


First I would say I'm not sure if there are ever good reasons to close code. If there are I'd like to hear them, but so far I haven't heard them in this thread.

But overall I would say that that's a myopic view of freedom. You're absolutely right that there's more bullet points on the list of actions developers can take when dealing with BSD/PD code, but in the same way you can say that making murder illegal restricts freedom: the list of actions people can take shrinks. But imagine all the societal ills that would occur if murder weren't illegal. Indeed, freedom from something is as important as a freedom to do something, and while certainly not as severe as murder, it's a harm nonetheless.

printz said:

Sure, it balances itself by resulting in fewer options for downstream potential developers, but the original code is still available, you can still create competing FOSS products. And competition is good. GPL doesn't really offer it: everything you want to copy is available, everything you make will be available. Where's the competitive enjoyment in this?


This is a really interesting point, and one I don't think anyone's definitively solved. When are people more productive, when they're competing or when they're cooperating? What are the benefits or detriments of either configuration? Smarter people than I disagree with each other about this, so I'm leaving it open.

I will say that I don't think GPL code eliminates competition. There are many different ideas about interfaces, implementation styles, programming language choice, architecture, blah blah blah.

printz said:

I don't find the looming control of closed software so dangerous. If a company's services become detrimental, we can always boycott their services, choosing a better competitor.


As others have pointed out, boycotting basically never works. Let's boycott AT&T! Let's boycott Verizon! Let's boycott Microsoft! Let's boycott Chick-Fil-A! Nope, not gonna happen.

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printz said:

And competition is good. GPL doesn't really offer it: everything you want to copy is available, everything you make will be available. Where's the competitive enjoyment in this?

Reinventing the wheel over and over is not good; if GPL prevents it, so much the better - projects can still compete if they consider competitor's code or approach bad.

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Ladna said:

By "viable" I intended to imply "more than 30 people use them". While that's somewhat hyperbolic, I think there are strong reasons why the BSDs are less popular than Linux, the main reason being the GPL.


I don't know - but I have my doubts that the GPL has anything to do with it. I's say it's more like brand recognition. People know the term 'Linux' but who can even say what 'BSD' stands for?

Ladna said:

First I would say I'm not sure if there are ever good reasons to close code. If there are I'd like to hear them, but so far I haven't heard them in this thread.


How about this: There's a large economy that depends on their trade secrets and the ability to make money off it. Not every work done for no direct revenue can be countered by indirect ways to make money off it (e.g. support fees.)

If everything was open source the entire computer industry would collapse. Not just the bigshits like Microsoft and Apple who abuse the system but everybody making a living developing software.

Oh yeah, I don't expect 'free' software demagogues to ever understand this concept. So just this: I'd be out of a job in a purely open source world so don't ever expect me to accept the FSF's agenda as 'the one true way'.

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Graf Zahl said:

Oh yeah, I don't expect 'free' software demagogues to ever understand this concept. So just this: I'd be out of a job in a purely open source world so don't ever expect me to accept the FSF's agenda as 'the one true way'.

Yeah... the job of wheel inventor. So you're totally not biased.

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You do not make a good defense of your position with such idiotic posts.

Reality check: People need money! They need a way to earn it. If software developers do not get money there won't be any software.

Open Source is an ideal that doesn't happen to match current economics. But well, as long as you get your source it's fine if 90% of all developers will be out of money, right?

Sorry, but you really need to grow up.

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Graf Zahl said:
Open Source is an ideal that doesn't happen to match current economics.

Is there really any need to match a failure?

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myk said:

Is there really any need to match a failure?

If only your idea of making closed source developers pay taxes to fund open source development would become real (obviously those "free software enterprises" receiving them would only care about money)...

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There are huge companies based on open source projects. Android continues to make money for Google. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation is sustained almost entirely by selling their search box to Google. Red Hat sells support for open source software and is crazy profitable at it. Oracle has the open source Java and MySQL projects. Everything except for ID's latest engine is released under the GPL. This even applies to web apps; Reddit makes tons of cash and their whole code base is open source.

In fact, most software companies realize that selling software isn't enough to stay competitive. The support contracts for Oracle DB cost far more than the software license itself. Same with Microsoft's enterprise software, reps always cut you a deal on per-seat costs but sell you hard on support contracts. That was the whole allure of cloud services; no support, no maintenance, no in-house IT department.

I'm not at all saying you can't make money selling software. That's obviously not true. I am saying that there's a strong history of parties making profit on open source software through selling content, support and advertising, and in fact businesses that sell software make most of their money on content, support and advertising, not on the software licenses themselves.

I would go further and say that the existence of Oracle DB hurts database development for everyone. Imagine all the money Oracle makes every year (billions). Imagine if we took 1/100th of that and applied it to PostgreSQL development. Everything would be different in the database world. You can argue that a lot of developers wouldn't work on DBs if they weren't being paid, or that there would be inefficiencies and blah blah blah, but that's why I chose the 1/100th figure, to assume that the other 99 100ths went to waste. It's still revolutionary.

Finally I want to say that I don't think that the lack of monetary incentives hurts dev interest all that much. Linux has untold gazillions of devs, and very very few of them have seen any financial reward from their work. Even more to my point, software and hardware companies have contributed code to Linux to make their products more competitive.

So to sum up, there are proven, effective ways to make money on open source software, and the lack of direct monetary compensation for work on open source projects doesn't seem to be a drag on dev and corporate contributions.

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Ladna said:

I'm not at all saying you can't make money selling software. That's obviously not true. I am saying that there's a strong history of parties making profit on open source software through selling content, support and advertising, and in fact businesses that sell software make most of their money on content, support and advertising, not on the software licenses themselves.

Pipedream for pipedream, I'd like a world without advertising over a world without closed-source.

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Ladna said:

So to sum up, there are proven, effective ways to make money on open source software...{snip}

Yes there are, however these are without exception dependent on economies of scale which are virtually unattainable for the vast majority of open source software. The cases you mention are fairly oddball when considered within the context of the bigger picture.

I don't disagree; I'm merely pointing out a significant fact.

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As for significant facts...

Ladna said:
First I would say I'm not sure if there are ever good reasons to close code. If there are I'd like to hear them, but so far I haven't heard them in this thread.

This is the comment that more or less warped the discussion into a black or white battle over the existence of closed source software. If there's anything appropriate about it, it's that closing sources is always at a cost.

It's a useful way to provoke development, but at a cost to society as part of the legacy in any point in software is appropriated arbitrarily by a select group. The same effect occurs with private enterprises in terms of money and productive means. That is, closing sources is useful for a group to get an advantage in a market but with a cost on the community. How do you keep that advantage while at least reducing the damage?

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Graf Zahl said:

You do not make a good defense of your position with such idiotic posts.

Thank you for your opinion.

Graf Zahl said:

Reality check: People need money! They need a way to earn it. If software developers do not get money there won't be any software.

Actually, there would be some. We need our computers to work, right? It also would be much simpler.

Graf Zahl said:

Open Source is an ideal that doesn't happen to match current economics. But well, as long as you get your source it's fine if 90% of all developers will be out of money, right?

I don't have an estimate of how many developers are doing nothing useful to society (duplicate or just useless work).

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tempun said:

I don't have an estimate of how many developers are doing nothing useful to society (duplicate or just useless work).

Define 'useful'.

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What people like tempun and Ladna do not realize that there wouldn't be any open source software if there weren't companies that make a living developing proprietary software.

GPL is essentially communism. And we all know how it turned out when an entire society tried to organzie itself to communist rules. It ended in a massive failure.

Now, not all ideas of communism are bad, they got some ideas right - it's just not sufficient to run a country.

The same goes for software. Open Source is great - but it won't be able to sustain the industry all by itself.

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myk:

I admit to knowing that statement was provocative, but I didn't know how else to get advocates for closed source software to come up with cases where closing the source was beneficial. I even think I said it more than once.

And yes I'll cop to more than a little thread hijacking. My bad haha :) .

I think the way you exert control over a project in a given point in its development is you implement something people like. The gcc/egcs fork/remerge is a great example of how competition developed internally in a project, the project split, the argument was litigated in the public sphere, and then the two parties reconciled. Certainly reconciliation is a rare thing in these instances, but it can't be said that forking is. If you want to go a step further, lighttpd took on Apache httpd using an asynchronous style of serving requests rather than a synchronous or threaded approach. This drove webserver development, and now you can choose an event-based MPM for Apache, and there are other popular event-based webservers (nginx being the current fad I think).

The point is, features and functionality win in the open source world too, and that's a way better way to win than just closing the source so your competitors can't keep up and your community can't fork if you make a decision they don't like.

Gez:

That is a great point. Sure the pipedream is free software for free forever, but if we're being pragmatic I think a good start is something we see at least in the Android market already: apps with ads that you can pay like $2 to get rid of. Again, naturally I want free apps with no ads, but I just don't mind supporting developers. Believe it or not sometimes I click on ads on my favorite sites, which seems both ridiculously over-generous (because clicking on ads feels so wrong and they probably don't get paid per click-through anymore) and pathetically inadequate as a means of support.

Also I think there's a place in Brazil that outlawed advertising entirely. Google around for it, I remember that the pictures looked like a paradise.

DaniJ:

Yeah but I would argue that's true for lots of software projects. Where is RealPlayer now (bahahaha)? Not having any stats I can't really tell you, but I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of software dies in obscurity, closed or open. Given that, I think it's even more important that projects open their source, because the likelihood of dying and having that work lost forever is so high.

Graf:

I don't know if I would liken the GPL to communism (although this reminds me of when Kilgore called AlexMax and I "Commissars", haha) because of all the negative connotations. I think the ways it's like communism - cooperation, equal resource distribution, equal rights - are laudable though.

However, I will argue that open source software does not require "companies that make a living developing proprietary software". How does PostgreSQL get along then? How do all the Apache projects get along then? What about companies or groups that don't make a living developing proprietary software? Red Hat develops OSS and sells support for existing OSS that they ship. The FSF and the GNU project get along pretty well and they're responsible for a huge amount of Linux' userspace.

FWIW I'm not really a socialist or a communist. I believe in a strong social safety net funded by progressive taxation because I don't think anyone should live in poverty or suffer from/die of easily curable maladies while Larry Ellison buys a new yacht every day. I also believe in strong regulations because it's how we prevent amoral entities like corporations and businesses from acting in inhumane ways (polluting rivers, for example). But other than that, go business go!

On a side note, you can't say that because a country with a specific system of government failed that that system of government is doomed to fail. Are democracies doomed to be overthrown because the US overthrew Iran's democracy in the 1950s, or France's democracy was invaded and nearly destroyed by Germany in WWII? What about Greece's democracy in the wake of their economic crisis? Are autocracies doomed to be overthrown because the US overthrew Iraq's autocracy in 2003? I'm not defending the USSR, I'm just saying you're making a fallacious argument.

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Graf Zahl said:

What people like tempun and Ladna do not realize that there wouldn't be any open source software if there weren't companies that make a living developing proprietary software.

GPL is essentially communism. And we all know how it turned out when an entire society tried to organzie itself to communist rules. It ended in a massive failure.

Now, not all ideas of communism are bad, they got some ideas right - it's just not sufficient to run a country.

The same goes for software. Open Source is great - but it won't be able to sustain the industry all by itself.

It's okay, there is a category of software that's easy enough to program to be open-source, but there are many where either the user interface is too bloated and uncomfortable (compared to cheap commercial apps), or can't catch up feature-wise (compared to more expensive ones).

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Graf Zahl said:

GPL is essentially communism.

Out of curiosity, do you consider regulated free markets "communism" as well? Because that description fits the GPL in my eyes a lot better than communism.

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Graf Zahl said:

I don't know - but I have my doubts that the GPL has anything to do with it. I's say it's more like brand recognition. People know the term 'Linux' but who can even say what 'BSD' stands for?

Berkeley Software Distribution. What do I win?

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I apologize for the long post. I've apparently missed out on some discussion. I'll number things in case anyone wishes to respond to a particular point.

Ladna said:

Second, it's not relicensing. Devs can use that clause to license their software under specific versions of the GPL.

1. Relicense. Upgrade. Potatoe. Potato. GPL v3 is different from v3.1. I'd call it a re-license.
Current versions of the GPL (sans alterations, thanks for everyone for pointing out that yes, you can choose to modify the license you start with) include said clause.

Ladna said:

What's the viable non-GPL alternative to Linux?

2. Well, if Linus would just license his code under a different license, maybe we'd have Linux under a BSD-style license. Oh wait, it's not his project, is it? It's owned by the GPL. Thanks for clearing that up.

Ladna said:

First, your project is never "owned" by the GPL, it is owned by you. I think you maybe mean "controlled", but that's not true either. You can always license your own code however you want.

3. Yet, if it's only my code in the project, that defeats the purpose of having licensed it with the GPL, which is to get a LOT of code from a LOT of people to make the project better. Thus, the GPL owns the project. It might not own *my* original code. But it sure does own a copy of everyone's contributions (including mine) in the project. Unless everyone later agreed to 'recontribute' said code to the project under a different license.

Ladna said:

And as I said above, the "I can't use GPL code" problem is solved by being GPL yourself, and I honestly don't see what the problem with that is.

4. And this is the root of the issue. There are many people out there who don't agree with the GPL. Neither do we like being told what to do. After all, you don't like me telling you that the issue can also be solved by noone using the GPL for their code, thus we should all use non-copyleft licenses.

Ladna said:

The "can't close the source" characteristic is important because it meant that even if Mozilla folded, their software projects wouldn't go down with them, thus establishing a permanent gold-standard browser.

5. Are you implying that a project like FreeBSD would somehow fold if the FreeBSD Foundation folded?

Ladna said:

We sort of agree. The technical problem was caused by Apple's refusal to open XCode's source.

6. Sort of will have to cover as much as we agree. I still think gcc has a lot of inherent technical issues in it, which will surface over the coming years. Some of those issues have already surfaced.
Also, refusal to release source is not a technical issue. Failing to be able to utilize gcc's sources is also not a technical issue. However, having to treat it like a black box, leads to technical issues in that you cannot get directly into the meat of it to do any fancy features.

Ladna said:

You're for code reuse because it leads to better feature development. How do you reuse code that's closed source?

7. I'm sorry, I didn't know that all BSD-licensed code is closed-source. </sarcasm>

Ladna said:[/b]I would rephrase your statement[/B]

8. Not rephrase. You gave your own statement.

GhostlyDeath said:

I like how people say with GPL projects there is no competition. Well that is a complete lie.

Also, as stated multiple times before, the license of the code applies to others and not the actual owners of the code.

Plus, it is an assholeish move if you take someone elses code who wrote it for nothing and made it open source and used it in your closed source project.

9. Example of something with competition? I mean, between competing GPL projects.

Again, the code you write belongs to you (short of signing it over to someone else). But the project you create isn't always solely yours.

There's a lot of commercial projects out there based on FreeBSD. Most of these commercial projects contribute back to the FreeBSD project, when they can. It's not always a complete one-way street, and I fail to see how it's "assholeish." But I can see how you might think it's rude, since you built something, they profited from it, and you got nothing in return. Again. "If I'm not benefiting from it, noone is!"

Ladna said:

By "viable" I intended to imply "more than 30 people use them". While that's somewhat hyperbolic, I think there are strong reasons why the BSDs are less popular than Linux, the main reason being the GPL.

10. So, you don't think the fact that Novell was suing the bejesus out of everything BSD at the time when Linux became popular had anything to do with it? Please tell me at least that you are aware of the fact that every business in the world was fearful of anything related to BSD while the Novell lawsuits dragged on.

Thus, I don't think license had ANYTHING to do with the why BSD had a slower growth curve than Linux. If you have every business (which is the biggest server market, and sells client machines) fearful of being sued should Novell have won the lawsuits, and thus ignoring BSD, you're going to stagnate its growth. This lawsuit has been cited numerous times as the reason why the community around Linux grew much faster than that around the various BSDs.

Ladna said:

...but in the same way you can say that making murder illegal restricts freedom: the list of actions people can take shrinks. But imagine all the societal ills that would occur if murder weren't illegal.

11. I'm glad we were able to avoid these odd comments during our discussion. I think it's been an amazingly pleasant discussion between someone who believes the GPL should be everywhere, and someone who believes that the GPL should be dumped in favor of more BSD-style licenses. Shame that it couldn't be avoided with anyone else, especially when they started (later on in this thread) bringing comparisons to politics into the discussion.

Ladna said:

This is a really interesting point, and one I don't think anyone's definitively solved. When are people more productive, when they're competing or when they're cooperating?

12. Reminds me a bit of the thesis topic for John Nash, in A Beautiful Mind. Now I want to watch that movie.

13. At some point in this discussion, it occurred to me that it feels like licensing is like religion. There seems to be something for everyone. You'll get your extreme believers, your disbelievers, everyone in the middle, and your complete deniers (public domain). Just don't try drawing comparisons to any particular religion for any particular license supporter. Every comparison can be shot down. Part of me really just wanted 13 points in the response. :)

(edit: fix typo)

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Lyfe said:

3. Yet, if it's only my code in the project, that defeats the purpose of having licensed it with the GPL, which is to get a LOT of code from a LOT of people to make the project better. Thus, the GPL owns the project. It might not own *my* original code. But it sure does own a copy of everyone's contributions (including mine) in the project. Unless everyone later agreed to 'recontribute' said code to the project under a different license.

Why should one particular founding author have overriding rights to everybody else's contributions? They were all of them made under the understanding that they contributing to an open project that would stay open. Their contributions are just as important - some of them possibly more important than - those Linus has made himself.

The GPL doesn't "own" anything, but all of the authors who contributed do, collectively, own their parts of the code. That you need all of their approval to do something rash such as changing the license is entirely appropriate. If I write half your OS for you, YOU don't get to turn around and do whatever you please with MY code.

Ego-ism, if it's going to be in effect, has to be a two-way street here.

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I think what Lyfe is getting at is that a GPL project transcends ownership of it's authors in the sense that once it is released publicly, that body of code takes on a life of its own. (Which is half the point in the license, doh!).

However, it is a much bigger leap to say that the license thusly owns the project. (Which is at best, argumentative posturing over semantics).

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I too am getting tired of the implication that GPL "owns" any code.
I do not know of any good short English word that describes the code situation clearly (rejected: "licensed" is unspecific to terms, "own" is too severe).
GPL is an agreement, a consensus, between the developers. GPL is also an agreement between the developers and the user community.

Releasing under GPL promises certain user relationships that users can rely upon and cannot be rescinded (for that copy of code) unlike what many other licenses may allow. Some alternative licenses have tried to provide this with other wording. This is meant to attract users, especially those who expand upon the code, that could not tolerate the uncertainty in many alternative licenses.

Finally, GPL also tries to appease the contributor who does not want their contribution used (stolen) by the hostile commercial entities that they have had to fight with so much. There may be some friendly commercial development but that does not make the hostile and predatory ones go away. The GPL is the legal weapon in that battle which is why it allows jumping to newer versions, which may be necessary if a legal loophole is forced into the interpretation.

The stuff that is talked about does not sound to me like the situation this legal weapon was aimed at preventing. You might argue for an alteration in GPL to make it clear to allow what you want. Alterations in GPL have been argued every year, but the fear is that such might weaken its defenses against some hostile commercial entity in a legal battle that is expected sooner or later.

Every protection against hostile forces has a downside and is usually a lot of trouble. No matter what you intend, the hostile forces will search for a crack and try to drive a truck through,
so protections may tend to seem extreme.

Edit: I expect that most of this forum knew all that already, but from the discussion other interpretations could be taken, and several have I suspect.

Edit: Any argument that can be stated as "I just want to .." suffers from putting one users interests over the conflicting interests of the other people affected. I give only a little importance to such arguments.

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DaniJ said:

I think what Lyfe is getting at is that a GPL project transcends ownership of it's authors in the sense that once it is released publicly, that body of code takes on a life of its own. (Which is half the point in the license, doh!).

However, it is a much bigger leap to say that the license thusly owns the project. (Which is at best, argumentative posturing over semantics).

Not entirely dissimilar from the argument about how corporations transcend human control; a collection of ethical-acting people can manage to run a company that is completely inethical in its actions.

I suppose there is a somewhat transcendent nature to the ownership in code under the GPL, whereby the more owners have owned a part of it, the less that any one person actually owns it at all. I'm not about to argue this is bad, though. I think it is an essential part of the license's design, in fact. Eventually, the GPL'd codebase can be looked at as an asset of the human race, period.

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I think that each developer should have the freedom to decide which license he uses and what he does with his work. No matter how much BSD or GPL is superior of each other. The real problem that I've seen in this thread is the fanaticism that people mostly put on GPL or in open source as general. The one most shocking fanatic fantasy that I've read in this thread was when someone suggested taxation for a closed source software developers.

I ask you people, who gives you right to control what I do with the code that I write? I think that you forget that even developers are people and what you're asking, is limiting our freedom to use our creativity and skills to do something awesome and then decide what happens to it. Should for example music artist be limited so that all his/her works must follow some rules that some group of people wants to enforce? If you answered not, then why should programmers be different?

What I do believe is that programmer's work should be protected by the copyright system as any person's other artistic work and there is nobody in the world that has right to demand them to do things like not close the source. The current patent system is already placing stupid restrictions, which I think is the worst thing that has happened. While I write some code, I should have rights to the product of my writing, not to the freaking idea.

And don't get me wrong. I think that open source is great! I have also contributed and shared some of my code that I can with others. I've used BSD license as I see no point to restrict fellow developers from using my code in their commercial applications and keep the source closed, as that's what I've done and it has helped me A LOT at work. Also it's not like that we don't contribute fixes back to the original project as thanks. I've seen it at work directly and also seen Apple doing it for LLVM and FreeBSD, as Epic Games doing it for Xiph.org's BSD-like licensed libs. Every company who uses BSD-like licensed code doesn't do this as most of them don't actually modify the original source code so there's nothing to contribute back to the original project.

That's all I wanted to say. The people who demanded some restrictions to my freedom ended up insulted me a bit. We developers are also people and should have equal rights to our work.

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Quasar said:

Eventually, the GPL'd codebase can be looked at as an asset of the human race, period.

Indeed, this above all else is the reason why I believe in the GPL (if not the motives of the FSF). It is the ultimate proverbial middle finger to the idiots who believe you can copyright an algorithm.

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About GPL owning the code, the thing is that if you think you might want to use your code under a different license later on, including external contributions to it, then you should be proactive about it and dual-license it from the get-go. Or use a different license altogether, such as LGPL or BSD.

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