Disclaimer about me (off-topic, POV):
I know this is not the perfect world for a GPL (in such a world programmers would be more like carpenters who work as needed, and be fixing burst pipes / bugs at users home, and be timbering tables and chairs / writing and installing software,..., "Peter?" "Yes, Darling?" "Could you search the number of the next hacker around from the yellow pages?" "Sure, are you looking for a new feature?" "Yes, it annoys me that I must always walk over the whole menu tree just to make a small box around some text!"), and I understand your position. But I am personally a great fan of a real knowledge society; I am not against software patents in general, but would prefer if they lasted only a few years, say 1 or 3 or so, plus many of the patented knowledge is absoulte non-sense. I am also against forbidding to re-engineer software, because it's like forbidding to open up my computer tower and study the mainboard layout. I am definitely not an advocate of forcing everyone to release your code for no charge, maybe in a remote future, but not know.
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Original post by Oluseyi
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Original post by phresnel
ensuring openness and placing that restriction on derivative products as well, while preserving author's rights.
I think it is personal opinion to describe "ensuring openness" as a restriction. How would you call it when A makes some free software for the sake of freedom, B then grabs a copy of A's work, puts a proprietary license upon it, and
re-markets that now restricted version to customers, so that customers have no freedom with respect to the product they paid their money for? [car sneaks in] Maybe so that the customer is forbidden to re-sell the software/car, and the customer needs to destroy the discs/crush the car himself in order to legally trash it. (I know that the car is not a perfect equivalent of software, but the act of buying/owning/tweaking/learning/reselling)
Imho, that's a restriction, and while
MIT+Co. are less restricting in themselves, it is easy to convert such software into a restricted variant, and hence morph the something that was produced for public sake into something that is a blind-alley, because it lies in customers attic, useless to those who don't have a license.
So, while GPL is more restricting in what it allows, it helps to
keep the underlying product/software unrestricted, and for that, copyleft is necessary, because a GPL with alienable copyright would be the legal same as MIT+Co., as the copyright owner is the one who is allowed to change the license.
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Do you now understand why it might be necessary to underline the ideological basis of the GPL, but not of, say, BSD?
Pardon, no. I still see BSD+Co. (sorry for all the XXX+Co.) as:
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Here's my software I have (maybe) cooked up in my spare time over years. Do what you want with it, if you make money or other profit with it, I don't care, I am only interested in the coding part (example missing) and maybe the widespread use (X). It doesn't matter to me whether you refine that meal with your secret ingredient and tell me about those so I can do better next time, or if you live a good life with my recipe + your ingredients and leave me back in my small kitchen, and you and the others you plagiarise me will be the only ones in the world who ever profit from it.
If you are unsure, the GPL gives you more safety w.r.t. your code, in that plagiarising your work is legally problematic, and later you can still switch to BSD or the like.
