🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <GUMBY.92Jan10065057@Cygnus.COM> gumby@Cygnus.COM (David V. Wallace) writes:
>   I think the major complaint that many people have with the GNU license
>   is that it's having an adverse affect not on the amount commercial
>   software (it's intention) but rather on the amount of unencumbered
>   software.  In other words, most GNU software would have been released
>   for general use had the GNU license not existed.  It wouldn't have
>   been sold.
>
>Do you have any evidence for this?
If I had concrete evidence I would have said "I know", not "I think".
I don't know of any commercial software companies which have switched
to using the GPL, they've simply avoided using any GPL'd code in their
software.  I don't know if the LGPL will change this, I'd be happy to
hear of examples.  On the other side it's hard to tell what any author
would or would not have done, unless someone wants to do a survey of
all authors who put their code under GPL.

>People are still writing PD software, or software with less
>restrictive redistribution conditions than the GPL.  Lots of software.
True, but that doesn't really tell us anything.

>Then again there's a lot of work that's been done to imporve GCC,
>especially for version 2, that various companies would have _loved_ to
>keep proprietary.  Instead it's all coming together so that everybody
>benefits.
gcc is a developer tool, and the GPL is designed to benefit developers.
However I don't know why you say that people would loved to have keep
it proprietary.  I don't know of any hardware companies who have abandoned
their own compiler projects and are using gcc instead.  But in any case,
GPL is a better fit in the hacker world, I'm more concerned that it is
not benefiting, and perhaps even harming, the end-users who have no
interest in compiling their software or ever seeing the source to it.
I don't see how those users are getting access to GPL'd technology.
Everyone points to Cygnus, but I haven't heard that Cygnus is selling
binary-only (source on request of course) distributions of GNU software
to end-users.  And one example does not an industry make.
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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.