Did you notice that I used the word "requests", not "requires"? In other words, if your conscience lets you disregard the request, or something outside your control forces you to, I'm not going to sue you.
I think there is a simple solution for people in the BSD camp who, like me, is disturbed by this story. Put the following text (or something similar) in your license file:
"The original author of this work requests that any useful modifications or extensions also be licensed under the BSD License."
After all, I think everyone who writes open source code does so with the hope and expectation that people who modify or extend it will share back, but unlike the GPL camp, some of us don't want to wield a big legal stick and say "share back or else".
No one has mentioned the possibility that consumers may on average benefit by better data collection and price discrimination. Game theoretic analysis shows this can actually happen. Check out this page if you know some game theory:
Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated
by the laws of physics. In particular, the speed with which a physical
device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of
information that it can process is limited by the number of degrees of
freedom it possesses. This paper explores the physical limits of
computation as determined by the speed of light $c$, the quantum scale
$\hbar$ and the gravitational constant $G$. As an example, quantitative
bounds are put to the computational power of an `ultimate laptop' with a
mass of one kilogram confined to a volume of one liter.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you notice that I used the word "requests", not "requires"? In other words, if your conscience lets you disregard the request, or something outside your control forces you to, I'm not going to sue you.
I think there is a simple solution for people in the BSD camp who, like me, is disturbed by this story. Put the following text (or something similar) in your license file:
"The original author of this work requests that any useful modifications or extensions also be licensed under the BSD License."
After all, I think everyone who writes open source code does so with the hope and expectation that people who modify or extend it will share back, but unlike the GPL camp, some of us don't want to wield a big legal stick and say "share back or else".
No one has mentioned the possibility that consumers may on average benefit by better data collection and price discrimination. Game theoretic analysis shows this can actually happen. Check out this page if you know some game theory:
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/monopoly-memory.txt
Here is a link to Seth Lloyd's paper:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9908043
Abstract: