support requirement

[Seth David Schoen]

Dj writes:

> <DEVILSADVOCATE>
> 
> [...]
> So, I'm Vendor Q. I have a working product and I make money from it.
> "Hey, GPL your product" says a section of the community
> (not necessarily my customers). "Why?" ask I. "Well, if you don't do it
> then we'll do it for you" comes the response. "So why should I make it
> easier for you?"... "But we won't duplicate it  by looking at your code,
> but by external reverse engineering". "So you don't need my code"?
> "Er, no, but it'd be nice if you went GPL". "Why?"...
> [...]
> 
> </DEVILSADVOCATE>

This can be put a little less harshly.

(1) Free software developers are always trying to produce software that
they need or want.  Sometimes they write things from scratch, sometimes
they join on an existing project, sometimes they try to imitate someone
else's program.

(2) If a company is persuaded that free software or Open Source is a good
idea, they have to consider how to go about it.  This includes the choice
of a license.

(3) If a company chooses a good license that developers are willing to
accept, more developers will release improvements.  If it chooses an
unfriendly license, or an extremely complex or unusual license, fewer
developers will be willing to contribute under that license, and many
will be more interested in reimplementing the software in order to get
equivalents under licenses that they are willing to deal with.

The canonical comment that I think of on this subject is Jamie Zawinski's
phrase "magic pixie dust".

	http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Just because something is released under an Open Source license does not
guarantee its the unconditional embrace by the community.  Choosing a
standard free license is one thing that could help on that score.

-- 
                    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)