Um.... when did either of your examples change their licensing? Perl is distributable under either the Artistic (which is generally considered legally dubious but the duality does seem to make the raving anti-GNU forces calm) or the GPL and XFree is of course released under the very BSDish X license because of the vast quantities of X code in it.
No way this thread can answer the question for you unless you tell us what YOU want to accomplish.
As for me, I'm a selfish bastard so I'd never consider anything but the GPL or LGPL for any code I happen to generate. The only reason I'd let others have my stuff for free is to be able to get patches back.
Others have different motives so would pick a BSD license. I can tell you that as a practical matter your choice is between a BSDish or GPL license. Any other sillyness in a license tends to just kill a project. It might not seem logical, but it is true.
Bad math dude. Figure the casualty rates for both. Take the worst case peacetime US death rate by violent crime and compare it to an annualized rate for your one dictator/world war per century.
And just for the record, has Europe EVER had a 100 year period with only one major war? This century has featured WW1 and WW2 plus a wide and varied assortment of minor actions such as the current festivities in Kosovo and Bosnia.
Now lets take Kosovo since it is so current they were breaking in on the walltowall coverage of the Colorado shooting for updates... Imagine the Kosavars were all armed. Do you think they would have been driven from their homes so easily? But wait! It gets better! Ask the right question: Would the shooting have ever started in the first place? Not likely. War is almost never fought between two well matched opponents. Wars tend to start when one side thinks they can WIN. Of course sometimes one side rekons wrong and pays a price for it.
To test this theory, let us conduct a small thought experiment by assuming this new theory of software creation took over all of the packages on a RedHat disk, since as the author points out the distro level is the logical point to collect the license fees from users.
Now RedHat currently has 450 packages, and I doubt this scheme would be viable if the average price per package dropped much below $1. So RedHat has two choices, charge $450+distro costs+profit or move to a DIVX style scheme of charging a small base fee to get the media and then charging when you install packages from it. (Think RPM doing secure payment transactions for each installed package)
Now we start to see the problems with the proposed system. The development system is a large and complex, therefore expensive subsystem which few would pay to install. Oops! There goes your many eyeballs looking for bugs since nobody will be reading the source without an SDK to work with.
Of course precompiled standalone binaries become preferable to scripts because they would avoid paying for both the program and it's interpreter. Watch Perl, Python, etc fall in popularity in favor of less efficient to code/maintain but less expensive to execute C code.
And lets face it, it is not JUST the free speech aspect we like, the free beer is also a factor. HOw many of us have installed labs of computers from a single CD? Well kiss that goodbye, and with it one of the major competitive advantages.
Just having Freedom from Accounting is a major advantage in my book. Not having to carefully count licenses and make sure somebody hasn't installed an extra copy of Orifice somewhere. Somebody figure the economic drain imposed by all of that beancounting. Now this scheme proposes to take that beancounting to whole new levels of complexity and stupidity. Who decides whether a hard to track down security fix is more valuable than a few feature?
Would anyone reading this want to live in the world I just described? I won't hold my breath waiting for a long stream of replies saying how happy people would be in such a world. So mark it up as yet another nice theory that made a wet smack when it ran into the Real World(TM).:)
Remember folks, Win95/98 is a 'dead' product line now according to M$. So what could they lose by opening up it's source? They don't have to GPL it you know, they can use an evil M$ license something like this:
"You may only use/modify/distribute this source code if you own a valid license for Windows 98. You may install modified copies only on machines which already have a valid license for Windows 98. Any other use constitutes theft and will be treated exactly the same as any other piracy case if reported to the M$ anti-piracy hotline."
2.2 with IBM PC365(dual PPRO) anyone?
on
Linux 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Hmm. Wonder what IBM did to their box? I'm typing this on a Dual PPro-166 generic clone box running 2.2.0-pre6 and it had no problems at all.
What's the point of any new port when it first comes up? You can't work on getting X or the USB ports working until you have a working machine to bang on. Patience!
Once it IS up and running correctly will be the time to judge whether the price/performance is worthy or not.
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Um.... when did either of your examples change their licensing? Perl is distributable under either the Artistic (which is generally considered legally dubious but the duality does seem to make the raving anti-GNU forces calm) or the GPL and XFree is of course released under the very BSDish X license because of the vast quantities of X code in it.
No way this thread can answer the question for you unless you tell us what YOU want to accomplish.
As for me, I'm a selfish bastard so I'd never consider anything but the GPL or LGPL for any code I happen to generate. The only reason I'd let others have my stuff for free is to be able to get patches back.
Others have different motives so would pick a BSD license. I can tell you that as a practical matter your choice is between a BSDish or GPL license. Any other sillyness in a license tends to just kill a project. It might not seem logical, but it is true.
Bad math dude. Figure the casualty rates for both. Take the worst case peacetime US death rate by violent crime and compare it to an annualized rate for your one dictator/world war per century.
And just for the record, has Europe EVER had a 100 year period with only one major war? This century has featured WW1 and WW2 plus a wide and varied assortment of minor actions such as the current festivities in Kosovo and Bosnia.
Now lets take Kosovo since it is so current they were breaking in on the walltowall coverage of the Colorado shooting for updates... Imagine the Kosavars were all armed. Do you think they would have been driven from their homes so easily? But wait! It gets better! Ask the right question: Would the shooting have ever started in the first place? Not likely. War is almost never fought between two well matched opponents. Wars tend to start when one side thinks they can WIN. Of course sometimes one side rekons wrong and pays a price for it.
To test this theory, let us conduct a small thought experiment by assuming this new theory of software creation took over all of the packages on a RedHat disk, since as the author points out the distro level is the logical point to collect the license fees from users.
:)
Now RedHat currently has 450 packages, and I doubt this scheme would be viable if the average price per package dropped much below $1. So RedHat has two choices, charge $450+distro costs+profit or move to a DIVX style scheme of charging a small base fee to get the media and then charging when you install packages from it. (Think RPM doing secure payment transactions for each installed package)
Now we start to see the problems with the proposed system. The development system is a large and complex, therefore expensive subsystem which few would pay to install. Oops! There goes your many eyeballs looking for bugs since nobody will be reading the source without an SDK to work with.
Of course precompiled standalone binaries become preferable to scripts because they would avoid paying for both the program and it's interpreter. Watch Perl, Python, etc fall in popularity in favor of less efficient to code/maintain but less expensive to execute C code.
And lets face it, it is not JUST the free speech aspect we like, the free beer is also a factor. HOw many of us have installed labs of computers from a single CD? Well kiss that goodbye, and with it one of the major competitive advantages.
Just having Freedom from Accounting is a major advantage in my book. Not having to carefully count licenses and make sure somebody hasn't installed an extra copy of Orifice somewhere. Somebody figure the economic drain imposed by all of that beancounting. Now this scheme proposes to take that beancounting to whole new levels of complexity and stupidity. Who decides whether a
hard to track down security fix is more valuable than a few feature?
Would anyone reading this want to live in the world I just described? I won't hold my breath waiting for a long stream of replies saying how happy people would be in such a world. So mark it up as yet another nice theory that made a wet smack when it ran into the Real World(TM).
Remember folks, Win95/98 is a 'dead' product line now according to M$. So what could they lose by opening up it's source? They don't have to GPL it you know, they can use an evil M$ license something like this:
"You may only use/modify/distribute this source code if you own a valid license for Windows 98.
You may install modified copies only on machines which already have a valid license for Windows 98. Any other use constitutes theft and will be treated exactly the same as any other piracy case if reported to the M$ anti-piracy hotline."
Hmm. Wonder what IBM did to their box? I'm typing this on a Dual PPro-166 generic clone box running 2.2.0-pre6 and it had no problems at all.
What's the point of any new port when it first comes up? You can't work on getting X or the USB ports working until you have a working machine to bang on. Patience!
Once it IS up and running correctly will be the time to judge whether the price/performance is worthy or not.