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License Defamation

Issue 99

From Issue #99
July 2002

Jul 01, 2002  By Lawrence Rosen
 in
How the GPL has been sorely defamed.
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"modifications" to a GPL

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/16/2009 - 06:58.

"modifications" to a GPL project is not the same as "usage". By the GPL definition, a modification of a library is merely using it in your project.

I see a problem with your response right there.

Re: Geek Law: License Defamation

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 07/01/2002 - 02:00.

Excellent, very well written. I especially like the "capitalism at it's finest" bit. I'd not previously thought of opensource as a barter system. It certainly knocks down many of the "open source is communism" arguments I've seen floating around the web.

Re: Geek Law: License Defamation

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 12/16/2002 - 03:00.

It certainly knocks down many of the "open source is communism" arguments I've seen floating around the web.
Not communism, socialism. ---But what does smack of communism is trying to paint a massive barter system based on code (not money) into being modern USA-style capitalism. Try and make your house payments or buy baby diapers with code.
This movement started when some under-funded academics rebeled against the commercial software industry. Their movement was then picked-up by contractors who are now mounting a war to reallocate their customer's budgets from commercial software products to commercial software services.
But in the end, the only things that get re-released for use by other contractors and their customers under OpenSource are works that were created in the public domain (for governments) or works created for ignorant customers who (knowingly or unknowingly) yielded the strategic/competitive advantage bought with their capital spending on services.

The result of this will be a shift from a system where capitalism/free-markets cause commercial software vendors to constantly improve and release better and better works (from DOS to WindowXp), to a bankrupt socialist system where everything is free and both quality and innovation suck
(from RHL4.2 to RHL8.0). People are making money now because they are draining it out of the commercial software product vendors (through services and distribution sales that stand on the back of open-source) --but when the commercial software vendors are truly gone, all customer needs will be addressed by free software. Only the process of downloading and installing it will remain as a viable way to make money (and rest assured, even that will be highly automated by the decendants of today's ISPs). In such a future, new and innovative software only gets written by customers who can financially afford it to gain strategic advantage over their competitors --and they are unlikely to release that back to the world for free --so stagnation occurs.

Perhaps after countless trillions of dollars of productivity and millions of jobs have been lost while mankind stagnates for 40-50 years with opensource-socialism, then commercial software companies will re-form to fill the innovation-void and defeat the socialist software movement --assuming the government/people let them.

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