Fishing License

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 07:01, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 06:05:41PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
> > Fanatical restrictions like that - and the GPLv2 restrictions
> > on what can be combined and redistributed - will keep
> > Microsoft in business for a long time.
> 
> Why are you so fixated on what a particular company does?

That particular company has been responsible for wasting
more of my time than any other, going all the way back
to when they milked MSDOS 3.x for ages even though its
32 meg disk partition limit was hopelessly outdated.
And I can't avoid thinking about how much of my tax money
has been wasted dealing with the same kind of problems that
any reasonable competition would have quickly eliminated.

> If you don't like GPL, there are alternative licenses, ranging
> from the most restrictive to most laissez-faire. Redmond
> and others have been known to use code published BSD-style 
> license, some of them under the EEE (embrace, extend and 
> extinguish) model. Maybe GPL and RMS aren't all bad, aren't they?

They are bad if what you want to see are competitive operating
systems and applications that can combine any required
components and distribute them to anyone willing to meet the
combined licensing requirements.  Once the GPL has been
applied to a component it is forever impossible to combine
it with anything with different restrictions.  Thus no one
can use it to lower the cost of deriving a full featured
system capable of competing with the existing monopoly.
So, RMS has probably made more money for Microsoft than any
of their employees.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com