🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <D87-MAL.91Nov8172504@bella.nada.kth.se>
d87-mal@bella.nada.kth.se (Mats L|fkvist) writes: 
>I see the choice between using the GPL for a piece of software or putting
>it in the public domain as choice between ensuring the freedom of the
>_users_ or ensuring the freedom of the _programmers_.

>The GPL restricts what a programmer can do with the code but ensures
>that the users of the code don't loose their freedom (to have it changed,
>fixed, ported etc).

This is actually the best thing I've heard anyone say about the GPL
lately, but I think it depends on an incorrect assumption --
namely, that there are many "program users" who have the interest/
ability/money to have code changed/fixed/ported etc.  It is, in fact,
more cost-effective for me to buy the next release of MacWrite or
Think-C than it is for me to enhance it or fix it myself, and I'm
actually someone with years of experience programming and fixing bugs
in other people's code.  For someone who is just a user and not a
programmer, I cannot see how this would ever make sense.

In practice, the users for whom free software appears to make the most
sense are computer science graduate students (I was one once), and
people tinkering with compilers (for the special case of GCC) who
don't want to write their own from scratch.  Even if I had the spare
time on my hands, I'd rather spend it doing fun things than hacking on
some sludgy old piece of code.

No doubt someone will say "but what about Cygnus?"  (As far as I know)
Cygnus is selling serious hacking expertise to largish (~100 people)
organizations that want specialized support.  For the customers
they've got (people who want tools for their new hardware, people who
want support for non-standard language features -- those are the ones
that I know about), this makes perfectly good sense.

On the other hand, mass market software consumers don't pony up
25-250K$ for software support.

David Chase
Sun