Are Bad Licenses Good For The Community?

mib writes: "ZDNet has an article about the history of OpenSSH that not only says that telnet sucks (duh!) but that that bad licenses are good for the the open source community because they cause some people to develop unrestricted versions of restricted software." This is a theme that develops more and more often when 'work-alike' apps are being created in order to migrate people from one OS to another.

Comments

No way.

[MostlyHarmless]

They say that bad licenses are good because they encourage people to write workalikes with good licenses.

Grade A prime bull.

If the license was free, then there would be no need to write a clone. Coders could instead work on othe, new projects instead of duplicating effort.

Are hurricanes good for the community?

[exploder]

MIAMI, FLORIDA: Almost eight years after Hurricane Andrew swept through the city of Miami, causing billions of dollars of damage, most of those whose homes or businesses were destroyed have completed the rebuilding process. In the vast majority of cases, the rebuilt homes and offices are better-constructed and more modern than the buildings they replaced. "Hurricane Andrew is the best thing that ever happened to this town" said one city council member.

stupid...

[pb]

Closed software is good because it gives us an excuse to reinvent the wheel and make better open software?

No, we do that to ourselves... Closed software is still bad, and if the world was Open Source, we'd *still* have 18 zillion versions of everything. Consider:

How many open programs are named 'ya*' or '?in?', for "Yet Another ---", or "?-- Is Not ?--"?

In the meantime, how many closed-source programs dominate the field for their type of application? (MS-Office; Windows; Photoshop; Quicken) Even if there are closed *or* open alternatives, people generally don't use them because of the stifling effects of closed software.

Even if Outlook and Eudora didn't exist, I guarantee you we'd still have mail, elm, pine, mutt.... etc., etc., ad infinitum. One program *or* one license is never enough for everybody in the Open Source world, and most people are just coding for themselves.

However, a commercial program like Outlook that is designed for the masses *does* give us something to shoot for; it's an example of "programming for the masses", which is what a program needs for more people to use it. So the Open Source e-mail clients of the future should be better for it.

BUT--this does not mean that if Microsoft opened the source for Outlook, that this would be worse--it would be better. Then we could examine it, pick it apart, and hack up a new e-mail client faster, fix some bugs, and avoid some mistakes. So open source licenses are still better, and closed programs provide an example, but they certainly don't help us by being closed, AND they aren't the reason why there are so many Open Source app/clones out there--that's just because everyone has their own itch to scratch.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's why OSS is less popular with the big guys

[Forge]

Bad Licenses are good for free software. This is the #1 reason why Linux and Apache are so relatively unpopular for Fortune 500 web sites compared to the sites of smaller enterprises.

You see a Huge company with 150,000 employees and a few Billion in annual profits doesn't buy software under the same restrictions as the rest of us. They don't suffer from bad licenses like we do.

Case in point. Nameless Big Company [NBC] buys a site license for NT. Latter it decides to create a web presence and simply grabs an NT CD and installs. As far as the internal developers are concerned NT Server is free because The site license essentially means paying for an estimated total number of servers with no penalty for adding more in the short term.

Even the CDs are different. I.e. No serial numbers to enter on the Corporate edition of MSOffice 97 when I had to install that.

Support is different too. They give the likes of NBC a different tech support number from the regular one. People answer that phone promptly and technicians come on site if needed ( for a pre established fee ).

Even Source code. yes. NBC can get the source code to windows if they ask for it. Sure it costs money but not nearly as much as that enterprise wide site license.

In short, bad licenses force ordinary users into open source and would have done the same to NBC. Except they get a not-so-bad license.

"Life Sucks. Then you die" -: Wolverine must have been talking to the small businesses who mistakenly believe that the fortune 500 became successful by choosing these tools ( which were only invented recently anyway ) and buy accordingly.