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Closing Off An Open-Source Product

Chris Gonnerman chris.gonnerman at usa.net
Wed Apr 11 19:32:21 EDT 2001 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Watson" <chris at voodooland.net>
Subject: Re: OT - Closing Off An Open-Source Product

> Nice way for the FSF to respect
> you're hard work. By forcing a license on you.

At the risk of getting napalm on me, I have to ask... how
badly has the GPL actually hurt you?  I respect your right
to disagree with Stallman et al (I often do) but the GPL
supports freedom.  The only thing you can't properly do 
with a GPL program is hide it.

If you choose to modify a program, and the program is GPL'd,
you know that up front.  The GPL is easy enough to read, so
you can't say you were surprised; if you don't like the terms,
you have to go elsewhere.  The fact is, all software licenses
work that way.  The terms of the Python license force certain
choices to be made also... specifically the regretable GPL
incompatibility.

I see from your .sig that you are a BSD user.  Cool.  Free
is good.  Free software isn't a religion with me (I am
closer to Eric Raymond's camp that way) but frankly I don't
like non-free software a bit.  Quality sucks.

(Yes, I am using Outlook Express under Windows 98 for those
of you reading my headers.  It does suck, but this is my
home computer... my wife and daugher would KILL me if I changed
it.)

This has been possibly the angriest discussion I've seen on
this list; the Python list (c.l.py newsgroup) has always been
a more polite place than that "other" P* language list, and
I'd like to keep it that way.
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