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Sorry I think you missed my point.
Lemur2 was saying that if you give something away and someone never gives anything back that they are selfish.
My counter argument is "Should you be allowed to stipulate this?"
I was merely commenting on the fact that he thinks because he has given something away, he feels he is owed something back.
My counter argument is "Should you be allowed to stipulate this?"
Should you NOT be allowed to stipulate this? No one said open source was about "giving something away". GPL is not a charity. Never intended as such. If people open their code, why can't they stipulate the conditions that the code can be used? If people choose not to stipulate, they can. If people choose to stipulate, they can also.
Put the shoe on the other foot: what gives people the right to demand that people give away their code without conditions? Why should I, for example, be forced to open up my code with BSD licensing? Why can't I choose to open up my code with GPL? v3 even.
So yes, you should be allowed to stipulate the conditions your code should be used. People just have to suck up their sense of entitlement.*
* And no, GPL isn't a "sense of entitlement", because GPL doesn't require reciprocation from projects that don't use GPLed code.
I agree with that. I was just pointing out that releasing code under the GPL was not giving it away, but rather providing it for an unusual price.
For people who truly want to give code away in a charity-like fashion, there is stuff like the Creative Commons CC0 license, which nicely deals with the problem of public domain licensing in countries where the notion doesn't exist.
Edited 2012-04-22 12:36 UTC





Member since:
2010-03-08
As others said, perhaps the GPL's restrictions on redistribution are precisely the retribution that the software's author is asking for.
If you make software for a living, you need money, but there are other motivations for writing software.