Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: The GPL is not open source.

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:8/23/2000; 12:36:51 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:19987 (In response to 19981)
Prev/Next:19986 / 19988

The GPL fails this test; its "poison pill" is intended to prevent creative people from being compensated for their creative work.

Close, but I'd like to nitpick. ;-)

The GPL doesn't tell you what you can do with your software--it tells you what you can do with somebody else's software.

For example, I disagree with several of Stallman's points. I don't think proprietary software is fundamentally wrong, and I have nothing against people who write it.

But I still use the GPL for certain projects.

Why I (Sometimes) Use the GPL

When deciding between a completely open license and the GPL, I ask myself a question:

In most cases, I can answer yes to this question.

For example, I released CustomDNS under a completely open license. If you want to make a proprietary version of CustomDNS, all you need to do is give me credit in your copyright notices.

But not everyone is quite so laid back. The Gnome and KDE developers don't want anyone to create proprietary versions of their desktop environments.

They remember what happened to the original BSD developers, and they choose to protect themselves.

User Rights

If I give certain rights to my users, I choose to call my software open source.

If I don't care what people do with my software, I use the XFree86 license, or something very similar.

If I want to ensure that all of my users get certain rights, I use either the GPL (for applications) or the LGPL (for libraries). In that case, other developers are not welcome to create a proprietary version of my work.

Cheers,
Eric

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:10 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.