Re: Charging the Charger [was: GPL v3 public performance idea?]

   >There are many EULAs, but this one is yours....

   Yes, but help me out here.  What we propose is really only a short term 
   mechanism for allowing a developer to charge, and in a way that guarantees 
   new code becomes mostly free always and totally free after a brief 
   delay.  Taran, your own statements in other locations indicate you see the 
   value of charging:

Here, you seem not to distinguish between charging for copies (or
services, etc., etc.) - behaviors which are _already_ allowed under
the GPL - and charging for secrecy, which is not allowed under the
GPL.

It is not rhetorically sound to glom all forms of "charging" together.

Economically, it may some sense to put these things into a category
together, because secrecy is a "good" like any other - but you still
shouldn't conflate _support_ for one form of charging with support for
some other.  To do so is like saying "But you spent some of your money
on some _other_ stuff, why don't you want to buy _my_ stuff?"

Free software advocates recognize that one _could_ sell secrecy, but
they aren't interested in being secrecy providers (when it comes to
code, let's just get that straight), or, typically, secrecy consumers.

And, by the way, to imagine this to be an "uneconomical" or
"philanthropic" choice would seem to be unwarranted.  There are
opportunity costs to both the secrecy provider, and (for similar
reasons) the secrecy consumer.  Your proposed license would presumably
be of interest only to people with low opportunity costs vis a vis
downstream secrecy.

Let me turn the question on its head and ask you: what do these people
stand to gain by making their software free at all?  Since I'm not
interested in making anything I write secret at all, I must assume
that your license is aimed at some other constituency - one that I
don't understand.