Re: What about an OS monopoly under GNU license?

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 01:58 AM 3/29/98 -0500, Carl Beaudry wrote:

>A license--even a free one--*IS* business.

That's a rather sweeping statement. I suppose if you want to go to 
extremes, you might consider *everything* -- including breathing --
to be "business." But such silly mincing of words misses the point.

The GPL is, indeed, anti-business. Don't take my word; read the 
words of the author! His intent, with the license, is to prevent 
the development of conventional commerical software that includes
freely distributed code. This hurts businesses and hurts innovation.
It rewards large companies such as Microsoft, which have legions of
programmers to apply to a project, and hurts the little guy who
needs code on which to build.

>And if you are somehow asserting that the GNU license inhibits software
>development, then you've got a lot of terrific, already-developed GNU
>software to handwave away.  

Again, you're missing the point. All of that software is "GNU" software.
We need commercial solutions as well. And by creating unnecessary
obstacles to the creation of that software, proponents of the GPL are
hurting consumers -- and themselves.

>And why do you suppose that FreeBSD, which has a Berkeley style license,
>has to run a lot of commercial software in Linux emulation mode?

Actually, there are relatively few situations where one must use Linux
emulation mode (the best examples are Netscape and RealAudio). I make
much more use of FreeBSD's SCO emulation, because most commercial UNIX
software does not support ANY freely redistributed platform. Again,
this is due to the fact that vendors believe that the ideology
behind Linux means that their software will be pirated.

Also, as mentioned above, the fact that "GPL'ed" code cannot be reused
in commercial applications is a terrible shame -- and a waste of good
effort. Developers shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in order to
profit from their labors. Your extreme and unreasoned rhetoric notwithstanding,
this is an important issue.

--Brett Glass