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

A question about the GPL

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:9/9/2000; 11:53:28 AM
Topic:Guido and Richard
Msg #:21077 (In response to 21069)
Prev/Next:21076 / 21078

Just wondering if it accomplishes its goals or if there are technical reasons why co-existence can happen at a non-superficial level, even though a license agreement seems to limit such cooperation.

Co-existence can happen. Would you like me to make some suggestions on how we can all live together peacefully? :-)

Now I can add to that, how can you be philosophically pure and run open source software on Windows or the Mac?

Most open source developers don't care about philosophical purity. In fact, most of them write proprietary, commercial software for a living.

Stallman may be widely respected, but his views have always been in the minority, even among people who use the GPL. Most people use the GPL to prevent major applications from becoming proprietary. Very few have any agenda beyond that.

The GIMP

Take a look at the GNU Image Manipulation Program (better known as the "GIMP").

The GIMP was originally written by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, two college students who needed an image-editor for Unix. They borrowed many ideas from Photoshop, wrote a few bajillion lines of code, and released the finished product under the GPL.

The GIMP is a real, honest-to-goodness user application for Linux.

When Spencer and Peter graduated, they handed the GIMP over to their fellow contributors, and got jobs in the real world. The last time I heard, neither of them was writing open source software.

Spencer and Peter used the GPL, even though they obviously disagree with Stallman. And they've never gone back on that decision.

A Litmus Test

The GIMP is a seriously non-trivial application. The source code takes up nearly four megabytes when compressed. We're not talking about some thousand-line library here; we're talking about years and years of work.

The GIMP is a major gift, and we have Spencer and Peter to thank. Here are the conditions of their gift:

So, you tell me: Are these conditions fair? And if not, why not?

Cheers,
Eric



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