Re: About GPL and proprietary software

Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 15:25, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Richard Huxton wrote:
> > > What happens with an application built on top of MySQL+PHP I couldn't say. I'm
> > > guessing your PHP scripts can be distributed under any licence you like, but
> > > you couldn't distribute MySQL+PHP with them.
> > >
> > > Anyway, their intention is that you *can't* distribute your application
> > > without either GPL-ing it or buying a licence. One of the reasons why a BSD
> > > licence is more friendly from a business point of view, although it does mean
> > > companies can release proprietry extensions that they keep private.
> >
> > And contribute them to the community after 1-2 years, which has happened
> > often.
>
> But they don't have to.  The Unix Wars were caused by large companies
> that took BSD and made proprietary extensions.  Thus, there are pit-
> falls to both GPL & BSD (not to mention straight-up proprietary
> licenses).

No question about it, but the Internet's ability to share code has
tilted the scales in favor of sharing,  I think --- companies get more
out of sharing than they do out of being proprietary (after a certain
period of time), and that period of time is shrinking.  For Red Hat, the
time is already zero, and for others it seems to be 1-2 years.

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