One thing to consider is that preventing forking in this way immediately curtails the number of lawsuits which may erupt over the ownership of code should commercial forking be permitted.
Say commercial forking is implimented. Bob Smith writes a open source implimentation of protocol A. Company B takes the implimentation, adds hooks to their API, and sells it knowing that the license protects them. Suddenly, Bob has to fight to get some sort of compensation from the company, costing a bunch of money which, as an open source author, he doesn't have.
Yes, commercial forking puts some heavy resources into making code golden, but it also tends to make it proprietary and unusable, and one of the goals of the GPL is to write programs which can, with some sweat, work anywhere. I prefer that over a proprietary distribution anyday.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to consider is that preventing forking in this way immediately curtails the number of lawsuits which may erupt over the ownership of code should commercial forking be permitted.
Say commercial forking is implimented. Bob Smith writes a open source implimentation of protocol A. Company B takes the implimentation, adds hooks to their API, and sells it knowing that the license protects them. Suddenly, Bob has to fight to get some sort of compensation from the company, costing a bunch of money which, as an open source author, he doesn't have.
Yes, commercial forking puts some heavy resources into making code golden, but it also tends to make it proprietary and unusable, and one of the goals of the GPL is to write programs which can, with some sweat, work anywhere. I prefer that over a proprietary distribution anyday.
Dan S.
Heh. It won't be the last prime day this year either. We'll have 2 more, on 11/23, and on 11/29. After that, no more prime days til 2001.