🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6NOV199102451712@minnie.me.udel.edu>, johnston@minnie (Bill Johnston) writes:
>>I could just put it in the public domain, but I can forsee the
>>possibility of some unpleasentness.  What if some software company out
>>there uses my code in a program that they sell commercially?
>
>But why is this so bad?  The code you wrote is still available for free.

I of course can't speak for the original poster, but if I think myself
in a similar situation I would think it's very unfair for the company
to put limits on the distribution of my program - they may add a
couple of features, or just change the copyright to their own and then
they can just ship the binary and take away the freedom of users to
have third-party improvements to the code and to share it with their
friends and others.

I personally don't see anything wrong with someone making money from
my ideas - well, if they make a few million $$ and I'll end up
starving, then I'll perhaps feel a bit silly because I didn't make the
million $$, but such is life.  But when someone takes my ideas or work
which I've made for everybody to use, adds a few insignificant details
and then starts to restrict the availablity of the ideas to others,
then I feel insulted and harmed since my ideas and work have been
turned into something very non-productive and very harmful to the idea
of sharing of tools, information and ideas.

Other people have reasons for putting their work in the public domain,
and that's OK with me - I don't want to take their right to do that
away, and I hope they are not trying to take my right of using the GPL
away.

Still others make their living at selling copyrighted software - I
don't want to take away their right to do that, and many of them don't
want to take away others' right to write public domain or GPL'd
software; many of them even benefit a lot from public domain and GPL'd
software (I'm told that for example Lotus uses gcc).

However, it seems that software patents and interface copyrights might
make both good public domain and good GPL'd software quite impossible
in practice, and I certainly feel that this is very unacceptable.

//Jyrki