🚀 go-pugleaf

mathew@mantis.co.uk (en font terrible) writes:

>No, I'm forced to conclude that the only "problem" was that you didn't
>get as much as you wanted from the commercial company.  Well, sorry, but
>forcing companies to give you things doesn't seem to me to be a very 
>good reason for putting programs under the GPL.

From my perspective it is the very best of reasons to put things under
the GPL.  That's why I have released a program under the GPL--so that
people like myself will get what I would want in their place.

And again, I posted originally in response to your claim that
``everybody could benefit'' if code were public domain rather than
GNU.  I remain unconvinced, because I would not benefit.  I may be an
unusual case, but then you have not persuaded me that the GPL is worse
than public domain.

>If anything, putting NOS under the GPL would have ensured that the 
>commercial company wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, since there would
>be no profit to be made from selling it -- and the users would have 
>had no version of NOS, rather than a buggy commercial version. Hardly 
>a more productive alternative.

Not so, because in fact Alpha Micro is distributing my port of gcc to
members of their software developer program.  Non software developers
can get the code, but they don't get access to the bulletin board or
to the update notices.  Alpha Micro chose to do this when we
demonstrated that gcc was vastly superior to their home brew non ANSI
C compiler.  Incidentally, Alpha Micro is not actually distributing
the source, just making it available upon request; I don't think
anybody has bothered to request it yet.

Alpha Micro is also considering distributing my UUCP package, despite
the GNU license.  Many people are perfectly content to pay a
reasonable fee for the right to call someone up and ask questions.

>Yeah, and which would you rather have -- a commercial version of the software,
>possibly with bugs, or no version of the software?

A third choice.  I would settle for a commercial version with source
code, but this is very unusual.  Your examples of it so far don't
carry any more weight with me than my examples do with you.
-- 
Ian Taylor                 ian@airs.com                 uunet!airs!ian
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