...any extensions to Qt have to be distributed under some sort of license that allows proprietary use by Troll Tech (I don't remember the exact terms).
You don't remember them because they aren't there. Troll Tech only gets rights to Qt derivatives (in the sense of copyright law), not to extensions.
But actually, they might not be able to proprietarize you derivations either! IANAL, but look at the clause in question:...a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain available under these terms... To my non-legal mind, this means that they can only use your derivatives in the Qt version you derived from. If you derived from the Free X version, they can't use it in the Win32 version without your permission. They could of course put it in the proprietary X version, but they would still have to include it in the free version as well. Again, IANAL.
You are only half right. Yes, it is asymmetrical. But there's nothing wrong with that per se. As with any copyrightable product, the authors have some rights to derivative works.
However, you claim about the QPL being incompatible with itself is totally off base. Troll Tech has zero rights to the code of third parties. Just because the QPL makes you open up your source code, it does not follow that Troll gets any rights to patch it into their proprietary version.
Yeah, it would be great if the Trolls treated Windows like Unix: free for free and proprietary for proprietary. I suspect that this has crossed their minds more than once. I sense some signals that something like this may happen in the future.
I see a lot of Windows developers on the Qt mailing lists. Probably just as many as there are Unix developers. From the questions they've posted and the comments they've made, I can surmise that at least a quarter of the Win/Qt developers are not doing porting. And this is despite the fact that Qt is not even close to the MS paradigm. The reason for this is that Qt is better, easier and more robust than MFC or Win32.
The first thing I thought of was "this would make a better GUI installer for Linux". So far, only the Mandrake GUI installer has worked on my system. And only SuSE worked on my friend's system. Everything else completely bombs. The reason for this is X. My card cannot be probed, thus, not detected automatically. My friend's card doesn't have a VGA mode, so it can't use the default.
An embedded Qt would allow distributions to use their own video detection routines. I don't know about frame buffers, but it seems that having two ways of making a GUI installer covers more bases than just the X way. Just load the library that's appropriate and use the same installer.
I can't wait for the day when companies get interested in profits again, as opposed to the current stock price. Used to be businesses sold products. Now they just sell themselves. Sounds too much like prostitution for my tastes.
I'm sure I'll get flamed but I think that a development library should not have a cost becuase you are trying to make a standard.
Don't worry, I won't flame:-)
The reason Qt has a cost is because Troll Tech is a business. Hmmm, was that a tautology? I actually think their marketing makes a whole lot of sense. Free for Free Software, proprietary for proprietary software. I wish the would do the same for their Windows product as well.
Troll Tech is still largely a one product company. They would be foolish to give away their only source of revenue. But this embedded Qt, coupled with some other new products coming out the same time as Qt 2.1, means that there will be more of an incentive to opensource their professional version as well. If they can make more profits by giving Qt away and selling the complementary products, then they will do so.
You don't know where to shop, do you? A paperback classic goes for 4.95. The typical paperback goes for one or two dollars more, but there's no royalties to pay for public domain works, so they're less.
Visit West Virginia, or any old mill town in New England.
Until two years ago, I lived in a rural county that had the country's highest poverty rate and the highest percentage of welfare recipients. That particular region, not demographic, had a damaged economy. I made no claim that particular regions won't have economic disparities.
If you think the auto industry could have thrived in a nation where 85% of the population couldn't afford to buy cars, take a long cold look at Medeival Europe (or modern Afghanistan) and call me in the morning. The kind of pervasive working-class poverty that Libertarians dream of would come with some problems which, for religious reasons, you are unwilling to recognize.
Neither Medieval Europe of modern Afghanistan have anything whatsoever to do with freedom or market economies. On one hand you have extreme totalitarianism and on the other near anarchy in a war zone. Of course neither of these groups could afford autos. Hell, they couldn't even build them!
The fact that you equate those two societies with libertarianism suggests you don't even know what a libertarian even is.
But if you want to take it on religious faith that all wealth is stolen from the poor and working classes, I won't try to proselytize.
I meant to convey the fact that the rich poor gap is widening.
Of course the gap is widening. So what? If you don't like people being rich to begin with, then please say so. But it's meaningless to say that the richer are getting richer than the poor are getting richer. It conveys no useful information.
While the country as a whole *is* attaining greater wealth, it is strongly top heavy. 'Free' helps eliminate rich privilage.
I'm assuming you're talking about the topic at hand, the Gutenberg Project. If so, I fail to see your point. The middle class can go into a bookstore and acquire any of those texts for $4.95. The poor can go into a library and borrow exactly the same works for free. The rich in this case have no priviledges.
But to the topic of "topheaviness". This is simply untrue. If the largest segment of the population were poor, you would have a point. But that is not the case. The largest segment of the population is middle class. Think of it as a bell curve. There are extrememly few destitute people in the nation, and the filthy rich are just as rare. But in between you have a smooth hump in the curve known as the middle class. There is no disproportionate lump at either end of the curve.
You're talking about individuals, I was talking about demographics. No matter what the economy or political system, there will always be some individuals moving downwards. There's simply no way to avoid it. Unfortunate but true.
However, by demographics I was not referring to job sectors. I was talking about race, parental economic status, gender, etc. If you want to talk about job sectors getting screwed by the rich, then let's not forget to include the all time poorest profession, the drayman.
Of course, only the wealthiest 15% of the population would be able to buy the products of those factories
Have you any realistic notion of economics whatsoever? Businesses want to earn profits and the only way they can do so is to sell their product or service. If a company can sell it's product for 10% less and make a bigger profit (since they will have more customers), they will do so in a heartbeat. Pull out your high school econ textbook and look up marginal costs. I would love to be a businessman in your above scenario, 'cause I would then target my business to the lower 85% that everyone else foolishly ignored.
American capitalism fails in giving freedom by making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
This is completely false. At best it is merely an example of lying with statistics. A widening gap between the rich and poor does NOT mean that the poor are getting poorer. If the rich get 10% richer and the poor get only 5% richer, guess what? The poor are getting richer!
Yes, there are some individuals getting poorer. Impossible to avoid that under any economic system. But in the US, there is no demographic or group that is getting poorer.
No, not B2/KDE! At least when I compiled it the default was Platinum, hardly perfect, but more "generic" than B2. The problem with B2 is that they've hardcoded colors into it. This may look okay with the default color scheme, but its radio buttons look like crap with the Desert scheme. kStep is okay, but mosfet needs to fix the slider widths, then it will be perfect. Marble and System are pretty cool if you like pixmapped themes, but they still look funky when using something other than the system color scheme.
Aaargh! No, no, no! You can eliminate fat without eliminating choice for the user! If your goal is to lose 40 pounds, you can go on a sensible diet and lose 40 pounds of fat, or you can go on a fad diet and lose 10 pounds of fat and 30 pounds of muscle.
If you look at the camera market, you'll see that most cameras are simplistic one-button affairs. But complex cameras are still available where the user has every option available. The poster seems to be advocating making professional photographers use disposable Kodak boxes.
Sure, there are dozens of ways to close a window. Just last night I had a program freeze up on me. "alt-f->x" didn't close it. So I clicked the close button. It didn't work either. So I used xkill, that worked. The point is, if there was only one way to close the window, I would have had to shut down the computer. Hardly a user-friendly approach.
Some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good.
But Linux/Unix/X/Gnome/KDE is not a collectivist utopia. There is no benevolent dictator omniscient enough to know which products get the axe and which don't. Like it or not, users and developers are individuals. And like individuals they each have their own wants, desires and goals. Your ideas are no more important than theirs.
Funny thing is, those who announce "some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good" never offer themselves up as the sacrificial lamb, which always leads me to speculate that they think themselves worthier than everyone else.
If Open Source remains purely voluntary, I will be unabashedly in favor of it. But I dread the day when the religion of free software succeeds in removing the choice of free software and making it mandatory.
It's apparent you can't differentiate between sarcasm and mental imbalance. I prescribe an avoidance of all humour until you determine the source of this malady.
I came from a small town and I am unfortunately still in the habit of not locking anything here in Metropolis by the Bay. I have come home several times to find my front door not locked (though never swinging wide open).
However, I have been robbed on occasion. I am well aware of the actions of sociopaths. How will your property-less society prevent sociopaths?
Here in Metropolis by the Bay, one city had the brilliant idea of providing "public" bicycles. They were for the express purpose of anyone to use who needed them. Within a week they were all missing or ruined beyond repair. However, my several of the local employers in the area provide free bicycles for their empoyees to use on the "campus". Occasionally one will turn up missing, but by and large they don't. The difference between the two is that one set of bicycles are not owned and in the other they are.
But perhaps a better example of the consequences of property-less society can be seen with housing. Although there are numerous exception, by and large, those who own their own homes take care of them and those that rent do not. This observation applies equally well to either wealthy and poor neighborhoods. Extreme examples of this can be seen on college campuses.
Property-less society is like any utopia. It looks good on paper but it can't possibly work in accordance to human nature. If people are not allowed to allocate resources amongst themselves voluntarily, the only other alternative is the dictator.
But a patch is NOT derivative! It doesn't matter one bit how dependent is upon the original. It is the equivalent of marginalia.
However, the *USE* of the patch in its intended manner will create a derivation of the original.
Like references, I think that this is something overlooked by copyright law. In my non-legal opinion, it would make sense to me to treat patches as separate and distinct works, but that the result of applying the patch would be a derivative. Thus one could have an MPL patch for a GPL program, whose result would be a GPL derivative, but one could also have a GPL patch for a MPL program that would be unusable unless the patch's author granted you a waiver to apply it:-)
Cool! Please tell me your residence address. Maybe when I'm in the area I could stop buy and help myself to any food in your fridge, piss on your rug, and drive your vehicle back home with me.
Or perhaps that is not what you meant. Perhaps you meant that you really believe in property, but that it should be all owned by a "benevolent" dictator who would parcel it out according to his omniscience to those in need. If so, please say so.
As the open source software world slides further into the capitalist world, where immediate material gain is the pinnacle of sucess, it will find money vs. community gain to be a compelling battle.
An economist will make no distinction between the value of money and the value of community. They are both equally valuable. Economically speaking, someone who forgoes a $90,000 job for the pleasure of working with the community as a volunteer receives just as much value and contributes just as much to society. But before you start condemning the capitalists, the converse is equally true. It is one's individual choices that matter.
Economists seem to focus more on money for two reasons. First, money is easier to measure than good will or community spirit. Second, most people confuse financial analysts who call themselves economists with actual economists, and thus think economics is all about financing and interest rates and stuff.
Because of the current economic disinformation campaign (also known as the US Presidential Primaries), I decided to hit some of my old econ texts. I was quickly reminded that all of economics can be distilled down into a few simple premises (with extremely complex interactions).
One of the basic premises is that a voluntary transaction will not occur unless both sides benefit. Apache itself is not sold but can be obtained for gratuis because it is worth more for the Apache developers not to charge for it. If it were worth more to them to sell it for $50 a copy, they would do so. Since they don't, it isn't.
The reason that it is more valuable for the Apache developers to release Apache at zero monetary cost is because they receive other values for it instead. Another economic principle is that costs and benefits are not limited to money. The various benefits that ESR lists for open sourcing a project, ego stroking, good will, sense of community, etc., are just as economically valuable as monetary payments.
The last point is very important, and one that some people completely over look. If money is less valuable than "good will" or any other ephemeral payment, then neither are these ephemeral payments any more valuable than money. We cannot economically judge one to be more important than another. Thus, to deny a corporation the ability to sell its software products, which is what it wants to do, is to create an economic loss for society. Note that when I say "sell software", I mean in the copyright sense of selling rights to it or selling undistributable copies.
Some folks in this community hold that it is morally wrong to sell software (see above note). Economics cannot judge whether something is moral or not, that is left to other professions. But it can say whether some policy creates losses in value to individuals or society. A mandatory open sourcing of software (whether by government decree or societal pressure) will create net economic losses. Economically, it will become more valuable to a developer to forgo opportunities to create new software in favor of waiting on tables instead.
I actually used the first Turbo Pascal, v1.0. And it was amazing at the time. Imagine! Doing a complete edit-compile-run cycle in just a few seconds!
Ah yes, I remember then. I was working in the UCSD lab with UCSD Pascal. Since we "knew" that UCSD Pascal was the best pascal, and since we were working in the very lab that produced it, we considered ourselves on top of the world and in the company of giants. We also considered UCSD Pascal to be fast despite its reliance on p-code (it was ahead of its time).
Then one of the proctors came in and said "you guys need to look at this". He pulled out a floppy with Turbo Pascal 1.0 and we loaded it up. Up came a simple editor and we typed in a typical standard Pascal program.
Then we started the compile. And it was done. That fast. We were stunned. Even though some of that speed arose from it compiling to memory instead of floppy, it was still SEVERAL orders of magnitude faster that ANY compiler we had ever seen. We ended up playing with it all day, and never lost our amazement.
Slashdot Mirror
...any extensions to Qt have to be distributed under some sort of license that allows proprietary use by Troll Tech (I don't remember the exact terms).
...a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain available under these terms... To my non-legal mind, this means that they can only use your derivatives in the Qt version you derived from. If you derived from the Free X version, they can't use it in the Win32 version without your permission. They could of course put it in the proprietary X version, but they would still have to include it in the free version as well. Again, IANAL.
You don't remember them because they aren't there. Troll Tech only gets rights to Qt derivatives (in the sense of copyright law), not to extensions.
But actually, they might not be able to proprietarize you derivations either! IANAL, but look at the clause in question:
You are only half right. Yes, it is asymmetrical. But there's nothing wrong with that per se. As with any copyrightable product, the authors have some rights to derivative works.
However, you claim about the QPL being incompatible with itself is totally off base. Troll Tech has zero rights to the code of third parties. Just because the QPL makes you open up your source code, it does not follow that Troll gets any rights to patch it into their proprietary version.
The Trolls are hiring Mac developers. Hmmm...
Yeah, it would be great if the Trolls treated Windows like Unix: free for free and proprietary for proprietary. I suspect that this has crossed their minds more than once. I sense some signals that something like this may happen in the future.
Why don't you guys run a separate X session? Then you can have two resolutions and desktops at the same time (something Windows can't do).
When I asked them about it, they used the "we have to eat somehow" line.
Do you have a problem with them eating? The levels of intolerance here at Slashdot have reached an all time low.
I see a lot of Windows developers on the Qt mailing lists. Probably just as many as there are Unix developers. From the questions they've posted and the comments they've made, I can surmise that at least a quarter of the Win/Qt developers are not doing porting. And this is despite the fact that Qt is not even close to the MS paradigm. The reason for this is that Qt is better, easier and more robust than MFC or Win32.
The first thing I thought of was "this would make a better GUI installer for Linux". So far, only the Mandrake GUI installer has worked on my system. And only SuSE worked on my friend's system. Everything else completely bombs. The reason for this is X. My card cannot be probed, thus, not detected automatically. My friend's card doesn't have a VGA mode, so it can't use the default.
An embedded Qt would allow distributions to use their own video detection routines. I don't know about frame buffers, but it seems that having two ways of making a GUI installer covers more bases than just the X way. Just load the library that's appropriate and use the same installer.
I can't wait for the day when companies get interested in profits again, as opposed to the current stock price. Used to be businesses sold products. Now they just sell themselves. Sounds too much like prostitution for my tastes.
I'm sure I'll get flamed but I think that a development library should not have a cost becuase you are trying to make a standard.
:-)
Don't worry, I won't flame
The reason Qt has a cost is because Troll Tech is a business. Hmmm, was that a tautology? I actually think their marketing makes a whole lot of sense. Free for Free Software, proprietary for proprietary software. I wish the would do the same for their Windows product as well.
Troll Tech is still largely a one product company. They would be foolish to give away their only source of revenue. But this embedded Qt, coupled with some other new products coming out the same time as Qt 2.1, means that there will be more of an incentive to opensource their professional version as well. If they can make more profits by giving Qt away and selling the complementary products, then they will do so.
You've never bought a book, have you?
You don't know where to shop, do you? A paperback classic goes for 4.95. The typical paperback goes for one or two dollars more, but there's no royalties to pay for public domain works, so they're less.
Visit West Virginia, or any old mill town in New England.
Until two years ago, I lived in a rural county that had the country's highest poverty rate and the highest percentage of welfare recipients. That particular region, not demographic, had a damaged economy. I made no claim that particular regions won't have economic disparities.
If you think the auto industry could have thrived in a nation where 85% of the population couldn't afford to buy cars, take a long cold look at Medeival Europe (or modern Afghanistan) and call me in the morning. The kind of pervasive working-class poverty that Libertarians dream of would come with some problems which, for religious reasons, you are unwilling to recognize.
Neither Medieval Europe of modern Afghanistan have anything whatsoever to do with freedom or market economies. On one hand you have extreme totalitarianism and on the other near anarchy in a war zone. Of course neither of these groups could afford autos. Hell, they couldn't even build them!
The fact that you equate those two societies with libertarianism suggests you don't even know what a libertarian even is.
But if you want to take it on religious faith that all wealth is stolen from the poor and working classes, I won't try to proselytize.
I meant to convey the fact that the rich poor gap is widening.
Of course the gap is widening. So what? If you don't like people being rich to begin with, then please say so. But it's meaningless to say that the richer are getting richer than the poor are getting richer. It conveys no useful information.
While the country as a whole *is* attaining greater wealth, it is strongly top heavy. 'Free' helps eliminate rich privilage.
I'm assuming you're talking about the topic at hand, the Gutenberg Project. If so, I fail to see your point. The middle class can go into a bookstore and acquire any of those texts for $4.95. The poor can go into a library and borrow exactly the same works for free. The rich in this case have no priviledges.
But to the topic of "topheaviness". This is simply untrue. If the largest segment of the population were poor, you would have a point. But that is not the case. The largest segment of the population is middle class. Think of it as a bell curve. There are extrememly few destitute people in the nation, and the filthy rich are just as rare. But in between you have a smooth hump in the curve known as the middle class. There is no disproportionate lump at either end of the curve.
You're talking about individuals, I was talking about demographics. No matter what the economy or political system, there will always be some individuals moving downwards. There's simply no way to avoid it. Unfortunate but true.
However, by demographics I was not referring to job sectors. I was talking about race, parental economic status, gender, etc. If you want to talk about job sectors getting screwed by the rich, then let's not forget to include the all time poorest profession, the drayman.
Of course, only the wealthiest 15% of the population would be able to buy the products of those factories
Have you any realistic notion of economics whatsoever? Businesses want to earn profits and the only way they can do so is to sell their product or service. If a company can sell it's product for 10% less and make a bigger profit (since they will have more customers), they will do so in a heartbeat. Pull out your high school econ textbook and look up marginal costs. I would love to be a businessman in your above scenario, 'cause I would then target my business to the lower 85% that everyone else foolishly ignored.
American capitalism fails in giving freedom by making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
This is completely false. At best it is merely an example of lying with statistics. A widening gap between the rich and poor does NOT mean that the poor are getting poorer. If the rich get 10% richer and the poor get only 5% richer, guess what? The poor are getting richer!
Yes, there are some individuals getting poorer. Impossible to avoid that under any economic system. But in the US, there is no demographic or group that is getting poorer.
No, not B2/KDE! At least when I compiled it the default was Platinum, hardly perfect, but more "generic" than B2. The problem with B2 is that they've hardcoded colors into it. This may look okay with the default color scheme, but its radio buttons look like crap with the Desert scheme. kStep is okay, but mosfet needs to fix the slider widths, then it will be perfect. Marble and System are pretty cool if you like pixmapped themes, but they still look funky when using something other than the system color scheme.
Limit user options, eliminate fat.
Aaargh! No, no, no! You can eliminate fat without eliminating choice for the user! If your goal is to lose 40 pounds, you can go on a sensible diet and lose 40 pounds of fat, or you can go on a fad diet and lose 10 pounds of fat and 30 pounds of muscle.
If you look at the camera market, you'll see that most cameras are simplistic one-button affairs. But complex cameras are still available where the user has every option available. The poster seems to be advocating making professional photographers use disposable Kodak boxes.
Sure, there are dozens of ways to close a window. Just last night I had a program freeze up on me. "alt-f->x" didn't close it. So I clicked the close button. It didn't work either. So I used xkill, that worked. The point is, if there was only one way to close the window, I would have had to shut down the computer. Hardly a user-friendly approach.
Some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good.
But Linux/Unix/X/Gnome/KDE is not a collectivist utopia. There is no benevolent dictator omniscient enough to know which products get the axe and which don't. Like it or not, users and developers are individuals. And like individuals they each have their own wants, desires and goals. Your ideas are no more important than theirs.
Funny thing is, those who announce "some groups just have to sacrifice for the common good" never offer themselves up as the sacrificial lamb, which always leads me to speculate that they think themselves worthier than everyone else.
If Open Source remains purely voluntary, I will be unabashedly in favor of it. But I dread the day when the religion of free software succeeds in removing the choice of free software and making it mandatory.
It's apparent you can't differentiate between sarcasm and mental imbalance. I prescribe an avoidance of all humour until you determine the source of this malady.
I came from a small town and I am unfortunately still in the habit of not locking anything here in Metropolis by the Bay. I have come home several times to find my front door not locked (though never swinging wide open).
However, I have been robbed on occasion. I am well aware of the actions of sociopaths. How will your property-less society prevent sociopaths?
Here in Metropolis by the Bay, one city had the brilliant idea of providing "public" bicycles. They were for the express purpose of anyone to use who needed them. Within a week they were all missing or ruined beyond repair. However, my several of the local employers in the area provide free bicycles for their empoyees to use on the "campus". Occasionally one will turn up missing, but by and large they don't. The difference between the two is that one set of bicycles are not owned and in the other they are.
But perhaps a better example of the consequences of property-less society can be seen with housing. Although there are numerous exception, by and large, those who own their own homes take care of them and those that rent do not. This observation applies equally well to either wealthy and poor neighborhoods. Extreme examples of this can be seen on college campuses.
Property-less society is like any utopia. It looks good on paper but it can't possibly work in accordance to human nature. If people are not allowed to allocate resources amongst themselves voluntarily, the only other alternative is the dictator.
But a patch is NOT derivative! It doesn't matter one bit how dependent is upon the original. It is the equivalent of marginalia.
:-)
However, the *USE* of the patch in its intended manner will create a derivation of the original.
Like references, I think that this is something overlooked by copyright law. In my non-legal opinion, it would make sense to me to treat patches as separate and distinct works, but that the result of applying the patch would be a derivative. Thus one could have an MPL patch for a GPL program, whose result would be a GPL derivative, but one could also have a GPL patch for a MPL program that would be unusable unless the patch's author granted you a waiver to apply it
Property of *any* kind is morally indefensible.
Cool! Please tell me your residence address. Maybe when I'm in the area I could stop buy and help myself to any food in your fridge, piss on your rug, and drive your vehicle back home with me.
Or perhaps that is not what you meant. Perhaps you meant that you really believe in property, but that it should be all owned by a "benevolent" dictator who would parcel it out according to his omniscience to those in need. If so, please say so.
As the open source software world slides further into the capitalist world, where immediate material gain is the pinnacle of sucess, it will find money vs. community gain to be a compelling battle.
An economist will make no distinction between the value of money and the value of community. They are both equally valuable. Economically speaking, someone who forgoes a $90,000 job for the pleasure of working with the community as a volunteer receives just as much value and contributes just as much to society. But before you start condemning the capitalists, the converse is equally true. It is one's individual choices that matter.
Economists seem to focus more on money for two reasons. First, money is easier to measure than good will or community spirit. Second, most people confuse financial analysts who call themselves economists with actual economists, and thus think economics is all about financing and interest rates and stuff.
Because of the current economic disinformation campaign (also known as the US Presidential Primaries), I decided to hit some of my old econ texts. I was quickly reminded that all of economics can be distilled down into a few simple premises (with extremely complex interactions).
One of the basic premises is that a voluntary transaction will not occur unless both sides benefit. Apache itself is not sold but can be obtained for gratuis because it is worth more for the Apache developers not to charge for it. If it were worth more to them to sell it for $50 a copy, they would do so. Since they don't, it isn't.
The reason that it is more valuable for the Apache developers to release Apache at zero monetary cost is because they receive other values for it instead. Another economic principle is that costs and benefits are not limited to money. The various benefits that ESR lists for open sourcing a project, ego stroking, good will, sense of community, etc., are just as economically valuable as monetary payments.
The last point is very important, and one that some people completely over look. If money is less valuable than "good will" or any other ephemeral payment, then neither are these ephemeral payments any more valuable than money. We cannot economically judge one to be more important than another. Thus, to deny a corporation the ability to sell its software products, which is what it wants to do, is to create an economic loss for society. Note that when I say "sell software", I mean in the copyright sense of selling rights to it or selling undistributable copies.
Some folks in this community hold that it is morally wrong to sell software (see above note). Economics cannot judge whether something is moral or not, that is left to other professions. But it can say whether some policy creates losses in value to individuals or society. A mandatory open sourcing of software (whether by government decree or societal pressure) will create net economic losses. Economically, it will become more valuable to a developer to forgo opportunities to create new software in favor of waiting on tables instead.
I actually used the first Turbo Pascal, v1.0. And it was amazing at the time. Imagine! Doing a complete edit-compile-run cycle in just a few seconds!
Ah yes, I remember then. I was working in the UCSD lab with UCSD Pascal. Since we "knew" that UCSD Pascal was the best pascal, and since we were working in the very lab that produced it, we considered ourselves on top of the world and in the company of giants. We also considered UCSD Pascal to be fast despite its reliance on p-code (it was ahead of its time).
Then one of the proctors came in and said "you guys need to look at this". He pulled out a floppy with Turbo Pascal 1.0 and we loaded it up. Up came a simple editor and we typed in a typical standard Pascal program.
Then we started the compile. And it was done. That fast. We were stunned. Even though some of that speed arose from it compiling to memory instead of floppy, it was still SEVERAL orders of magnitude faster that ANY compiler we had ever seen. We ended up playing with it all day, and never lost our amazement.
BSD says steal all you want, please!
It is logically impossible to steal that which is free.