Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) To : comp.programming From : Richard Heathfield Date : Tue Aug 30 2005 09:37 am Chris Sonnack said: > One of them is the perception free==crap. The folks from whom > I bought my last dog (RIP ) were originally giving away > the pups. No one (pardon the pun) bit. Raised the price to > 25USD and they (here I go again) ran away. > > Price is one thing. FREE is another. Absolutely right - that perception has always been a good rule of thumb for people in the past, so why should they change now? Having said that, software breaks a lot of perceptions, and this is clearly one that it shatters. > Seems to me the only ones pushing this agenda are those with a > direct, and IMO rather selfish, perceived benefit. *I* want to > modify my software. *I* want to get free source code. I like to share my stuff with other people if I can. I think it's cool that some other people want to share too. Not everyone wants to share, and I can understand that. After all, there's stuff on my dev box that I /don't/ want to share, too. The important thing, I think, is this - that it should be the author (or, if you prefer, the owner) of the software who decides whether it's "for share" - NOT the consumer. That is, we should respect intellectual property rights, not just to the letter, but also in spirit, so to speak. I think Borland has it just right. They've shared some of their stuff, because they're nice people - but nice people don't have to share /all/ their stuff, so for their other stuff, the stuff they sell, they say "look, treat it like a book - Joe can use your copy, sure, but while he's using it, you shouldn't be able to use it at the same time, okay?" and I think that's a good balance. Microsoft's licence agreements are written in such scary language that they always make me wary of installing the software. So I don't. :-) -- Richard Heathfield "Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999 http://www.cpax.org.uk Email rjh at the above domain .