🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <24723@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>We have found the opposite to be true.  If you put your product under
>copyleft, and sent sources to all your customers along with binaries,
>your competitors would not touch your sources.  They'd be deathly afraid
>that some ``virulent'' copylefted code would get into their product
>by accident, and then all *their* sources would have to be freed.  I'm not
>joking.  If you sent the sources directly to your competitors, they would
>probably be returned unopened.

Legally they are probably doing the right thing.  If I take a look
at some commercial copyrighted code and then go off and write something
that does the same thing I run the risk of being sued.  Do I run the
same risk from GNU software?  Might you think I had copied GNU code
and so insist on inspecting my code?

>Instead, your customers would be really happy.  They would fix the
>program where it chafes them, improve it where they wish it did some
>simple thing, and probably would send you back their changes (*they*
The vast, vast, vast majority of computer software customers are *not*
developers.  That mindset is going to kill Unix.

>This has happened for GCC.  Nobody has stolen optimization techniques
>from GCC.
How do you know?

>We've been living this story for a couple of years now.  There is a lot
>to learn and understand in the `free software market'.  Things are not
>always as you would predict them to be.  But it seems to be true that
>free software will tend to drive out commercial software, where the two
>are roughly similar.  Customers simply prefer it.  And as long as you
Is there a single example of this outside of selling developer tools?
I hate to keep harping on this, but damn it, it's the business I'm in
and GPL restrictions make my life that much harder.
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I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.