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

That would be public domain

Author:Todd Blanchard
Posted:9/9/2000; 9:43:37 PM
Topic:Guido and Richard
Msg #:21091 (In response to 21036)
Prev/Next:21090 / 21092

Some people do release things into the public domain.

Of course, if you do that, you give up all control of your work. Most people don't want to give up control of major chunks of work - they want to have a say in how that work gets used. How would you feel if you released the source code to a product and it was rebranded and sold commercially for real money with nothing other than cosmetic (logo) changes? I think you'd be kicking yourself. Especially if it were done by a company you found offensive for some reason or other. If you had renouced all control rights, you couldn't stop it.

You might also want to make money on it at some point down the line - I believe that was your tactic with Frontier for awhile - first few free but when you got to a certain level of sophistication you started charging money for that. Perfectly reasonable approach. DragThing went that way and when it went commercial I was totally hooked on the thing - I forked over the cash right away.

RMS uses his license as a club - thats kind of a turnoff and I think the GPL doesn't do a good job of addressing what the Enhydra license calls "larger works". Although there is a version of the GPL called the LGPL (Light or Library GPL) that does provide for creation of larger works that need not have the source code released. I think that makes much more sense for libraries - its only apps really that need the full GPL protection IMHO.

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