Jeremy makes a persuasive argument for LGPL

[Anthony Taylor]

On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 19:33, Roland wrote:
> At 01:58 PM 2/18/02 -0600, Sean Farley wrote:
> 
> >They have release Darwin as well as an NFS testing tool.  FreeBSD did
> >benefit a lot from that testing tool.
> 
> Yes, I have read that by now. This is another point in favour of the BSD 
> license.

No, that's a point in *Apples* favour.  The BSD license did not make
Apple give anything back; they were not required to participate.  They
could have taken, without ever contributing.  But, Apple feels a sense
of community.  Hell, they are almost single-handedly responsible for the
initial PC revolution (pre-IBM-pc days).

Granted, they also have a sense of money, too.

Take, for instance, Microsoft's attempted hijacking of the Kerberos
protocol.  MS almost took an accepted standard, and almost perverted it
to their ends, by using free software that did not require anything of
them.

For those of you sleeping last year, the MIT license allowed Microsoft
to use the Kerberos source code without any real requirements. 
Microsoft used the extension "feature" of Kerberos to enable MS
operating systems to participate in a Kerberos domain, but a standard
Kerberos system could not participate in a Microsoft Kerberos domain.


> >Besides, as the owner of a company, he can always decide not to develop
> >code for those potential customers who wish to keep the resulting code
> >closed.
> 
> Of course he can do that. But this means losing a lot of customers to other 
> companies. The xGPL would prevent this.
> 
> Roland


Okay, I'm a strong supporter of the GPL.  But this is just selfish.

			- Tony