On Wed, 07 November 2001, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote: 
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 06:48:35PM -0800, David Johnson wrote:
> > I did not intend to misinterpret what you wrote. Here it is:
> > "somebody gets rich, you and the community gain nothing"
> 
> WRONG (sorry for caps, but they are deserved)
> THIS is what I wrote:
> 
> <<
> a) anyone can make a proprietary version of your program, or proprietary
>    extensions of your program.
>    somebody gets rich, you and the community gain nothing
> >>
> 
> Quite different than saying I said
> "somebody gets rich, you and the community gain nothing"

OK, I give up. exactly how is it that "quite different"?
a simple "diff" says he quoted your sentence verbatim.

has anyone mentioned that if someone
"makes a proprietary version of your program" or
"gets rich" on that proprietary version of your program

that you have lost nothing?
that nothing has been taken from you?

"gaining nothing" means nothing has changed on your side
of the equation.  no harm has been done to you.

just because someone uses an open-source program
and doesn't 'give something back' to the community,
doesn't mean that person is abusing open source.
millions of copies of Linux are being used today.
how many of them are just users? I've used Linux at
home for some time now, and I've yet to send in
a patch, bug fix, or even a thank you note.

and it's no different if the user is just some
guy who wants a word processor and calander program
for his personal use, or someone who is using
open source to create a proprietary program.

in either case, open-source is caused no harm.

Proprietary software causes no harm to the
open-source community.

saying it does has got to be the most pervasive 
logical fallacy in the free software community.

Greg







--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3

