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 Posted by Saint on Monday December 04, 2000 @ 03:26 PM
from the I'm-freer-than-you dept.
Nikolai Bezroukov has an in-depth paper on the relative merits of BSD style open source license versus the GPL 'free' license. Particularly with regard to their economic ramifications. This article appears to be comprehensive, reviewing all the various licenses. '...one of the most controversial properties of GPL is the viral property of GPL 2. In essence if you the author of some useful addition to the GPL program that
was widely adopted and developed further you are denied any subsequent modification, enhancement of your ideas in...case you [are a] commercial developer. There are
several consequences of viral property of GPL v.2 (and IMHO this needs to be changed in v.3...' Thanks to Tim Cook for this link.
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Re: BSD license vs. GPL
by Oliver White on Monday December 04, 2000 @ 05:19 PM
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A fellow asked me to echo my thoughts here from the free-pm mailing list...
Tim Cook wrote:
>>> I would not say that I was convinced about the GPL. <<<
Ok, more to the point, what are your qualms about the failings of the GPL in a commerical sense? I'm not so bothered myself, but many free software/open source developers really aren't happy about contributing code to a community that allows people to then take those changes and incorporate them into their own product without contributing their own changes to the pool of software.
I think what you need to understand from a commercial perspective, especially the case of the health care industry, the advantage we have is of pooling resources and standardising on a code base.
The thousands of health care organisations benefit from the open source *process* (as opposed to the source code itself) by being able to cooperate to develop one piece of software which they can all copy freely, rather than pay for each copy they make, and dissallowing them from contributing to the software.
I don't see any advantage in letting persons fork the code into a proprietary product that may take resources away from the primary pool of source code, and indeed there are many disadvantages. This is a matter of finding a better process for developing software, not altruism.
The money will always be in the services you can provide to support the free code. It is indeed short sighted to think that there can be money made in selling a propriatary product without harming the efforts of the free software code base.
Be shrewd in your decision.
--
Oliver White
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Re: BSD license vs. GPL
by Andrew P. Ho on Monday December 04, 2000 @ 07:24 PM
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I think GPL is better for a small service company (like FreePM) that attempts to provides service for a software product that it is trying to promote. GPL restricts what contributors/authors can do with the modified code. This prevents a larger company from incorporating FreePM into their proprietary product and then provide free/packaged service.
If that happens, then competition will no longer be at the level of "who provides better service". It would again be - product X has this feature that FreePM does not, so we have to buy product X for $2 million which will also give us 1 year of free support. After that, it would be - we have to upgrade to product X-2001 since we already have 1500 patient records in the system and it will be more expensive to look at another system.
GPL is a mechanism that deprives the authors their freedom to make their code proprietary. This is hard to do since it takes blood-and-sweat to get to a useful product - but it may also be what's needed to move competition from software to service.
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Re: BSD license vs. GPL
by Gregg M on Thursday December 07, 2000 @ 04:09 PM
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GPL is a mechanism that deprives the authors their freedom to make their code proprietary.
The author of a work decides what copyright he thinks is right for him, not anyone else. So how can that deprive anyone of anything? Should I be able to tell Stephen King to change his copyright? You can do anything you want with GPL software, the only stipulation is that you must release the source code. If you wanted something different then why would you use the GPL?
Of course this is not about the author being deprived. This is an article about people who want to take GPL code and not release the source to their changes. They want to take code but not return the favor. Right?
Talk all you want about freedom but if you'd just written the code yourself from the ground up, you wouldn't have the problem. Would you! You want to take code from other programmers, and use it as your own!
Gregg
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