Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Joe Butler
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 06:51 pm

This from that page:

"Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software
in all the ways that are socially useful"

The problem is that a commercial app is not given the freedom to use 'free
software', even thought it may be of great social value.  Unfortunatly, the
person/team that want to produce this software don't have the time to
develop an app that is given away for free, and they can't give up their day
jobs just yet.

How much money have Sun spent doing Open Office - your average
company/person cannot afford to spend money like that just so they can give
away the final product.


"Rob Thorpe" <robert.thorpe@antenova.com> wrote in message
news:1124813295.213548.132430@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Joe Butler wrote:
> > So, what's the reasoning behind these licences that don't allow a
commercial
> > (closed source) apps from using them?
> >
> > In once sense, if the idea behind the GPL, etc. is to benefit others,
this
> > is a limitation that will reduce the number of people that can actually
> > benefit from it.  A closed source app is not going to open its source
just
> > so it can use some GPL.  If the source was allowed to be used by all,
> > without the restrictions on commercial apps, that would benefit a lot
more
> > people, wouldn't it?
> >
> > You'd have commercial apps integrating GPL stuff that people would buy
if
> > they offered something that the free alternatives didn't offer.  You
have
> > all the free stuff, just as if the commercial app didn't exist (except
that
> > you might have fewer users due to some of them prefering the commercial
> > alternative).  You'd still have the open source 'community' that could
> > emulate the commercial app, if they wanted to.
> >
> > I think if I were producing a commercial app and wanted to use some GPL,
I'd
> > just write an open source wrapper around the GPL stuff and release the
> > wrapper so that commercial apps were allowed to use it - the wrapper
might
> > be a bit of a dog to use though ;-)  Would that layer circumnavigate the
> > restrictions?
>
> You should read: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ to understand the
> argument.
>
> Note that the Open Source community did not create the GPL, the
> free-software community created it.
>

.