support requirement

[Seth David Schoen]

Dj writes:

> VAB wrote:
> 
> > A fact rarely mentioned on the list is that release under a
> > license other than the GPL brings with it the danger that
> > the software product will be reimplemented under the GPL.
> > This is likely if Vendor X releases under a license which
> > is unattractive due to say, required support terms.
> 
> That reads more like carefully couched GPL blackmail.
> 
> "Release under GPL or we'll copy your product make it GPL ourselves".
> 
> [...]
> 
> What are the ethics of duplicating the functionality of an application?

It's somewhat traditional.  For instance, the GNU project duplicated the
functionality of essentially _all_ of the standard Unix utilities.  I can
hardly count how many re-implementations of vi have been done.

Most people in the free software world are willing to accept the idea of
duplicating a proprietary program based on observing it (and reading its
documentation) without access to its source code.  In _many_ cases,
proprietary libraries, kernels, or APIs have been re-implemented; this
sort of happened in BSD because of the AT&T lawsuit, and the WINE project is
very consciously doing it with the Win32 API at the moment.

Some people are willing to accept duplicating a program through disassembly,
decompilation, and other reverse engineering techniques (assuming that no
actual code is copied).  That's much more controversial, ethically and
legally.

-- 
                    Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>
      They said look at the light we're giving you,  /  And the darkness
      that we're saving you from.   -- Dar Williams, "The Great Unknown"
  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/  (personal)  http://www.loyalty.org/  (CAF)