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

Making money

Author:Brett Glass
Posted:8/23/2000; 3:15:59 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20008 (In response to 20002)
Prev/Next:20007 / 20009

Good points. I, too, put food on the table via software.

There are currently two kinds of software for which source is publicly available. There is what I call Truly Free Software -- software which is either in the public domain or is licensed under a license that permits reuse by anyone for any purpose. The licenses commonly used for this category of software include the BSD and MIT X licenses.

Then, there's "poison pill" software -- software that is available for the use of anyone except developers who wish to incorporate it into their own work. Most of the latter software is licensed under the GPL, which really should be named the PPL (for "Poison Pill License"). This software destroys markets for commercial software without affording developers the opportunity to be rewarded for creating enhanced versions of it. The poison pill in the license also prevents commercial and non-commercial developers from working together on (and from) the same code base. This deters standardization and causes work to be redone needlessly.

We should encourage the former, but not the latter. Creativity should always be rewarded, and to attempt to destroy people's livelihoods is spiteful and unethical. The purpose of the GPL/PPL is to turn publicly available code -- normally a good thing! -- into a weapon against commercial software developers and their livelihoods. We must embrace truly free licenses and reject the poisonous ones which are intended to do harm.

--Brett Glass

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