Re: GPL and Economics

"Patrik Stridvall" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> The possibillity to add proprietory addition that most open source licenses
> (GPL exluded) allows, at least short term, to make it possible to generate
> income to pay developers because of the monopoly on the proprietory addition
> given by copyright law. With this money it makes it possible to release
> other parts of the work under an open source license. While this for
> (non-GPL)
> isn't mandatory it quite obviously makes it possible to for "good" people to
> finance their work so more and more code eventually will be released.

I think you have put your finger on a key difference between GPL advocates and
advocates of other open source licenses.  Advocates of other licenses trust
that enough "good" people will continue to contribute back to the public code. 
GPL advocates fear that enough "bad" people will simply take their code, even
write proprietary additions, and then never release any of their code back to
the public.

Both sides have plenty of examples to point to.  BSD UNIX and X/Windows are
evidence that open source software can develop and flourish without the GPL. 
GPL advocates can point to various commercial developers who have used open
source software without giving anything back to the public.


=====
Sincerely,
Matt Seitz

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