P.J.: First of all, Kevin, open-source
licensing isn’t inherently evil; but it’s certainly not for
everybody — and definitely not for a company that wants to keep
control of its intellectual property. Although I would be the last
person to shill for Microsoft, I have to say that its attempts to
explain disparaging comments, made earlier this year by some of its
executives, display a better understanding of what drives
technological advances than anything I’ve heard coming out of the
open-source camp.Here’s the problem: Under a pure open-source licensing
environment such as the GPL, it’s bloody difficult to accomplish
much without relying on the work others have already completed. If
you develop a tool that uses code covered by GPL, you’ve
effectively lost the rights to your work. You have to make the
source for your project available to anyone who asks. If I wanted
to code for a living, the biggest disincentive I can think of is
being forced to give away my hard work for free.Kevin: I think you’re reading a bit more into
the GPL than is really there, P.J. It’s true that if you base your
project on a GPL package then your work will have to be GPL as
well. This is not true if you simply use GPL libraries or if some
subset of your package uses GPL software. For example, if I build
an appliance that uses Linux as its OS with other GPL packages
installed on it and then create my own binary packages for the
applications running on the appliance, there is no reason that I
would be forced to release the code for my project.”
Complete Story
[A visit to the GPL FAQ maintained
by the GNU Project might be in order before addressing some of the
points made in this article. -ed. ]