From: Robert Kern on
On 2010-05-08 22:03 , Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Martin P. Hellwig"<martin.hellwig(a)dcuktec.org> writes:
>> I fail to see what is morally wrong with it. When I ,as the author,
>> share my work to the public, I should have made peace with the fact
>> that I, for all intends and purposes, lost control over its use.
>
> Does the same thing apply to Microsoft? If I get a copy of MS Office,
> do you think I should be able to incorporate its code into my own
> products for repackaging and sale any way that I want, without their
> having any say? If not, why should Microsoft be entitled to do that
> with software that -I- write?

Martin is not saying that you *ought* to release your code under a liberal
license. He is only saying that he does not believe he is inviting moral hazard
when *he* decides to release *his* code under a liberal license. He was
responding to Steven who was claiming otherwise.

> Is there something in the water making
> people think these inequitable things?

Is there something in the water making people think that every statement of
opinion about how one licenses one's own code is actually an opinion about how
everyone should license their code?

> If Microsoft's licenses are
> morally respectable then so is the GPL.

Martin is not saying that the GPL is not morally respectable.

--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco

From: Robert Kern on
On 2010-05-08 22:12 , Paul Rubin wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano<steve(a)REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
>> For the record, I've published software under an MIT licence because I
>> judged the cost of the moral hazard introduced by encouraging freeloaders
>> to be less than the benefits of having a more permissive licence that
>> encourages freeloading and therefore attracts more users. For other
>> software, I might judge that the cost/benefit ratio falls in a different
>> place, and hence choose the GPL.
>
> I don't know if it counts as a moral hazard but some programmers simply
> don't want to do proprietary product development for free. That's why
> Linux (GPL) has far more developers (and consequentially far more
> functionality and more users) than the free versions of BSD, and GCC
> (GPL) has far more developers than Python.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Show me some controlled studies demonstrating that
this is actually the causative agent in these cases, then maybe I'll believe you.

--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco

From: Paul Rubin on
Martin wrote:
>>> I fail to see what is morally wrong with it. When I ,as the author,
>>> share my work to the public, I should have made peace with the fact
>>> that I, for all intends and purposes, lost control over its use.

Robert Kern <robert.kern(a)gmail.com> writes:
> Martin is not saying that you *ought* to release your code under a
> liberal license. He is only saying that he does not believe he is
> inviting moral hazard when *he* decides to release *his* code under a
> liberal license. He was responding to Steven who was claiming
> otherwise.

As I read it, he is saying that when someone releases free software,
they have "for all intends and purposes lost control over its use", so
they "should have made peace with the fact" and surrender gracefully.
I'm asking why he doesn't think Microsoft has lost control the same way.
From: Carl Banks on
On May 8, 7:58 pm, Paul Rubin <no.em...(a)nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Carl Banks <pavlovevide...(a)gmail.com> writes:
> > People who esteem their users give them freedom to use software
> > however they see fit, including combining it with proprietary
> > software.
>
> Huh????  That makes no sense at all.  Why should a standard like that be
> expected from free software developers, when it isn't expected from the
> makers of the proprietary software who you're proposing deserve to rake
> in big bucks from locking up other people's work that they didn't pay
> for?

Same thing's true commercial software, Sparky.

If a commercial developer has a EULA that prevents users from
combining their tools with tools from (say) their competitors, they
would be very much disrespecting their users. The GPL does exactly
that, and people who release GPL software disrespect their users just
as much as a commercial entity that requires you not to use competing
products.

But for some reason when someone and inflicts the disrespect of the
GPL on the community they're considered folk heroes. Bah.


> I've got no problem writing stuff for inclusion in proprietary products.
> But I do that as a professional, which means I expect to get paid for
> it.  And I think you have the "esteem" issue backwards.  Users who
> esteem developers who write and share software for community benefit,
> should not whine and pout that the largesse doesn't extend as far as
> inviting monopolistic corporations to lock it away from further sharing.

In your petty jealous zeal to prevent megacorporations from profiting
off free software, you prevent guys like me from doing useful,
community-focused things like writing extensions for commercial
software that uses GPL-licensed code. The GPL drives a wedge between
commercial and free software, making it difficult for the two to
coexist. That is far more detrimental to open source community than
the benefits of making a monopolistic corporation do a little extra
work to avoid having their codebase tainted by GPL.


Carl Banks
From: Aahz on
In article <7xtyqhu5sg.fsf(a)ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
Paul Rubin <no.email(a)nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>I don't know if it counts as a moral hazard but some programmers simply
>don't want to do proprietary product development for free. That's why
>Linux (GPL) has far more developers (and consequentially far more
>functionality and more users) than the free versions of BSD, and GCC
>(GPL) has far more developers than Python.

What does your argument claim about Apache?
--
Aahz (aahz(a)pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx prgrmmng.