Sephiroth is a better character than Kefka; I'll give you that. However, Sephiroth is just a rehashed Kefka!
-Kefka was the original bad guy that became an angel! -Kefka betrayed the empire that built him before! -Hell, Kefka was a product of technology that involved manipulating the basic form of magic in their planets. -Kefka killed the imposible-to-revive character before too! -Sephiroth planned on destroying the planet to become a god. Kefka actually did it!!!
If you only play FF7, you may say that Sephiroth is such a cool guy, yadayada. However, if you put it in historical perspective, Sephiroth is just Yet-Another-Angel-Final-Boss (YAAFB?).
Kefka was the man. The only thing that makes Sephiroth a better character was the Cloud Flashback in the secon disc, and his music (I'll take One winged angel over dancing mad any day, but I also like a lot Dancing Mad).
Kefka roolz. And can kick Sephiroth ass any day of the week:)
-Summons: The FF6 summons weren't as broken as in FF7. Yeah, they were powerful, but not so much. Even of you didn't got Knight of the Round, you could easily grab Odin, which was also very good (yeah, KOTR killed everything in sight, but Odin wasn't bad). -Bad Ending: at least the characters talked in FF6! FF7 left you hanging there! Makes me think about Neal Stephenson... The best FF ending I have witnessed was the one from FF8. FF5 was good also. -Way too easy: FF6 was easy, but not to the point FF7 reached. On the FF7 side, I can say that it had cool secrets bosses (Weapons). -Horrible load times: FF7 was for the LoadStation. FF6 was a SNES cartridge. nuff said. -Long cutscenes: The longest one in FF6 was the opera. It was pretty cool, though. FF7 had cool scenes, however, I have played it twice, and I am not thinking about playing it a third time, unless a good remake comes (why doesn't Square Enix learn the Enix way of remakes?...DQ remakes have been all cool). FF6 will be played again as soon as I found myself without a good new game:) -Tiring Battles: Mmm, I remeber my main FF6 party, of Cyan, Celes, Sabin and Setzer (gotta love coin throw!), was always on the verge of dying. Every battle was intense, but yeah, repetitive. FF7 Main Party was Cloud, Cid and Yuffie (that way you got the best lines:), and was f*cking invincible AND repetitive. No contest.
Don't take me wrong. I like FF7, but I don't think it was the best rpg ever.
I don't think I have played such a game yet, but there are some favs: DQ6, FF6, Chrono Trigger, FF Tactics (NOT the advance version, which is horrible!), Breath of Fire 3. Yeah, I haven't played some of the latest great things. Maybe I will buy a PS2 if the DQ5 remake gets a translation.
The first FF I played was FFVII. However, after liking a lot said game, I went back, and played the older ones. I have played FFI (never finished that one...is way too primitive), FFIV (hyped by nostalgic fans; good if you like basic rpgs), FFV (good game, a shame that west skipped this one) and FFVI (f*cking great game).
FFVI is my fav. The history is great, the fact that you could select (at some point of the history) which group of characters follow, and a lot of other small details that help making the story a little less linear, make it a winner.
Yeah, FFVII was good, but: -Had a lot of long cutscenes. -Summons were way too powerful (and boring. Here is a hint: play the game without ever using summons, and the game quality will go up a little) -Way too easy (even without summons). -Very linear game. -Worst. Ending. Ever. -Horrible load times for battles. -The battles were tiring. (When I was reaching the end of the second disc, I started playing without volume, because the battle theme was driving me mad).
The bottom line: great story, and 3D characters against good (at the time) 2D backgrounds don't
FF8 fixed the summoning problem (replacing it with the renzokuken problem, which was worst.:), and a great ending. However, you couldn't care less about the villain (Ultimecia? who the heck was her...pseudo-spoiler: some people say she was Rinoa), and the magic system was broken. I liked FF7 best.
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Have you read Asimov's lost masterpiece? [homeip.net]
How is "The end of the eternity" a lost masterpiece? I readed it a lot of years ago, and, while I agree it is a great book, it is by no means "lost". That sounds like the book was found recently and published postmortem.
Sound familiar? Back in the day, ALL cameras were made of a metal body. You could blugeon someone to death with your camera and it would still be alright to take the murder scene photos afterwards. You can't do that with today's plastic cameras.
And not being able to kill someone with your camera is bad because...?
Buy a knife, hammer or gun. Most do-it-all devices don't do anything well at all.
* Capcom was making noise at one point about an MMORPG based on the Ghouls & Ghosts & Goblins/Gargoyle's Quest/Demon's Crest universe. What happened to that?
It wasn't a MMORPG, just an online game, like the next Resident Evil for PS2. I readed a preview once. Don't know what happened.
They are trying to broadcast the wrong game. They should try and cover one of those crazy street fighter tournaments. There are a lot of advantages:
-Game is better suited to espectators. -Real skill can be noticed. -Every game seems different. -You can actually say "woah, that combo was cool", grab your console and try it. All the skill in a FPS leads to teamwork (hard to see for a spectator anyway) or aim. Aiming is boring as hell. Yeah you can kill a pixel miles away. It doesn't look cool if you aren't doing it.
Smash Bros Melee is also a good option. Tekken, Virtua Fighter too.
If in the process of building your app you find and fix a bug in the image library, wouldn't it make sense for you to send a patch upstream and be done with it forever? Otherwise, every time you upgraded you'd have to fix the same stupid bug again, taking time away from more fruitful work.
Perhaps someone can clarify for me a) whether I explained that OK and b) whether that is actually what happens in the real world with BSD projects?
It is a valid argument. I don't know how frequently this happens, but it is almost sure it happens sometimes.
And if PB DOES get it's foot in the door, it could prove to be more profitable to CB than PA is to CA. Because PA would have to be GPLed, CA really couldn't charge too much for it, or another entity could just purchase it and start distributing it itself for free or for profit. It's why Windows XP Home is $200, OS X personal is $130, but Red Hat Linux personal was only $40, Mandrake is $100, and SuSE is $30, despite the Linux distributions coming with programs that do everything under the sun. If they charged more, people would just say "the heck with this, I'm downloading it", while vendors such as Apple and MS can afford to charge a lot more because working pirated versions are harder to get a hold of (not much, but they are harder) and are illegal.
Linux-on-the-desktop is a completely different discussion. I don't think it is ready for it, and don't think that will be in the near future. However, your point is a valid one. However, even if CA (GPLed...damn that lousy notation I used) goes out of business, it will take a lot of work to recover the PA's marketshare back to CB.
So again, I don't really think that it comes down to anything more than just a philosophical discussion of what you want people to be able to do with your code. If you don't care if a company uses it without compensation, I think the BSD license makes more sense. If you do care, and want anyone who takes advantage of your code to return the favor, the GPL is more suited to you.
I don't think it is just a philosophical decision. I just made an example of why it is an advantage to the programmer to release under GPL vs release under BSD.
Where this gets dicey, though, is if MySQL contains any code which is owned by someone else. For example, if I make an improvement to MySQL, and they incorporate it into a newer version, they could not release it under any license other than the GPL without my approval, unless they were to remove my code.
AFAIK, the MySQL company buys back any contribution they seem fit to integrate into the MySQL project, so it is most probable that they are the sole owners of MySQL.
Strange quirks like this are one of the reasons why the FSF asks people to give the copyright of code over to them rather than to have all of the individual programmers retain copyright.
This also makes a lot of people uneasy about the FSF. I didn't heard about this, and now I am also uneasy
A project released under the GPL stays under the GPL. No retroactive licensing may be applied to the code. This does not prevent me (the author/copyright owner) from re-licensing the code under any other license that I deem useful.
Yeah, but since the original author still retains copyright over the work, he has the right to say, from this point on, this work will be completely closed source. The older versions, are still GPLd, and someone else may take over manteinership.
In the situation that I released under GPL and then took the code back immediately before anyone had a chance to gain access to it, my GPL'ing of the code is essentially moot. It would be as if I had never released the code under the GPL.
I'm of the opinion that, in your scenario, company CA would, had they based their project off of PB instead of PA, likely released their code anyway.
likely is the keyword here. likely != certain. And I would even say that "posible" is the adequate word here.
Most companies are going to be too anti-OSS to use PB.
??? I'm going to guess you wanted to say PA here, which would mean that most companies won't want to be in the obligation to redistribute their code under the GPL.
Again, in your example, say PB (the BSD one) didn't exist and CA and CB were left with only the option of using PA (GPLed). I put to you that company CB would probably not use the project anyway, and either purchase one or write their own.
In which case PA would be likely (yeah, this time it is not so sure) first-to-market, their product would be better and cheaper, while PB would have no chance to compete. Again, this will not be necesarily true all the time, but I think that most of the time, it would be true.
Anyway, saying that either GPL or BSD doesn't make sense seems silly to me; it's a personal decision.
:%s/doesn't make sense/it is not such a great idea/gI
(I guess "doesn't make sense" is a little extreme)
I don't think releasing the GPL actually encourages many contributions, as most of the time companies would just turn away to other solutions.
Think of linux on business world vs FreeBSD on business world. I know, I know, for a lot of reasons, Linux got more spotlight when critical decisions were taken, but I don't think that the license was a minor one.
I could even make the argument that BSD licences would help push OSS. Propriatary products incorporate the BSD'd code, and improve from it. The improvement from these spur new motivation and ideas to develop the open source software.
What if the propietary modifications are under some wacky patent, and you can't emulate them. And consider the fact that a lot of work will be lost on reinventing the wheel (IF it is legally posible), and that most probably the original propietary modifications will be dropped in favor of the BSD'd ones, losing a lot of time for the propietary developers. You can avoid all those pitfalls by using GPL (or your favorite, copyleft compliant equivalent)
A) I'm still waiting. And waiting. Think of the publicity if Microsoft went and embraced and extended my stuff. But it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Heck, if they're still dragging their heels in their drive to steal and proprietarize FreeBSD, Apache and X.org, what hope do I have as a tiny guy with a tiny project?
Who said Microsoft? (Yeah, maybe I did..., maybe I didn't. Can't bother to check)
B) What's wrong with *using* stuff for profit? Doesn't the GPL say it doesn't regulate and restrict *use* of the software? Or were you thinking of another license?
Nothing.
C) Think of all the poor GPL developers who are still waiting to be paid by Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, IBM, HP, SGI, Sun, etc. Is it somehow okay for some companies to exploit Free Software developers, but not for others? I'm sure you'll say you meant something else, but your unconscious slip gave you away.
I think of them. Maybe they would be better starting their own companies. (Yeah, maybe not).
Try to read what I write very carefully before you respond again.
Is this a subtle insult?
...However, if this "unrepaying" use of open source code enables the developers it hires to contribute to some other open source code in their spare time, then the open source community gets something (else) back.
That is a lot of "if's". IF the developers contribute to some project. IF the projects actually gets further than a "pre-alpha" on Source Forge. IF the project is actually something useful. IF the project doesn't die out of lack of interest.
On the other hand, a Company develops GPL project. Open Source Community get something back. Direct. Real. Tangible (well, as tangible as source code can get:)
I didn't mean to imply the hypothetical company was benevolent. I'm saying that greedy companies can hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry.
Companies are greedy by definition. It would be a great thing to use that greed to enhance the open source community.
...hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry. Therefore, the interaction between the open source community and commercial entities is not as simple as the original post made it to be.
If you take a BSD licensed project, modify and sell it, that is not an open sourced project. The discussion here is about making money while contributing to the open source community. There are business (big business indeed) that are contributing to open source AND creating jobs. With GPL-like licenses. They do it this way, because if they used BSD style licenses, other companies would come and just take away from IBM, and give nothing back.
If you are on the creative side, you are better with the GPL. If you are on the side who wants to just take someone else work and sell it as yours, you can't do better than promote BSD.
Numerically, I expect the gross majority of open source developers to have day jobs at greedy companies that far prefer BSD licensed code to GPL code. The growth of either does not imply the downfall of the other, because the two entities feed off each other. To say that BSD code does nothing for the open source community is probably as wrong as saying free software kills commercial software vendors.
I expect that too. However, do note your use of the word "prefer". Most people "prefer" getting something for nothing, but most must get something for something else, and those companies will be forced to use GPL, even if they prefer to use BSD. I don't think that at any point in the future, all software will be GPL'd, BSD'd (no, not blue screen of death'd) xor closed source.
However I do expect a rise of companies that use and create projects based on GPL, versus the downfall of companies that just take BSD projects, modify and sell them, being the primary reason of this that the number of projects using BSD will fall, and the fact that their closed source products will be worse. And I don't think that companies who sell software THEY created, will ever release it under BSD. Well, there are a lot of wackos out there.
It's not really that simple. Take a large piece of software that would cost millions to build commercially, such as Linux, for example. Assume that BSD (the OS, not the license) did not exist as an alternative. A company that could not use Linux without keeping its additions secret may simply not pursue the entire product, because it's too expensive to build otherwise. A company that chose to use BSD OS might go ahead with the product and hire 20 developers,...
Why would the company want to keep the additions secret? Yeah, there are a lot of valid reasons, but once they fail to release the modifications they made, guess what, it is not an open source project anymore, EVEN if it is based on a open sourced project. So it falls out of the discussion. BSD-like licenses do NOT help the open source community. GPL-like licenses DO.
who might then contribute to other open source projects in their spare time.
Yeah, I guess all those MPAA head honchos donate to charity and the FSF on their free time. Yes, I know that most open source projects are started in someone's spare time. But the article is about making money while doing open source projects, not making money and contributing to open source projects in spare time.
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Sephiroth is a better character than Kefka; I'll give you that. However, Sephiroth is just a rehashed Kefka!
:)
-Kefka was the original bad guy that became an angel!
-Kefka betrayed the empire that built him before!
-Hell, Kefka was a product of technology that involved manipulating the basic form of magic in their planets.
-Kefka killed the imposible-to-revive character before too!
-Sephiroth planned on destroying the planet to become a god. Kefka actually did it!!!
If you only play FF7, you may say that Sephiroth is such a cool guy, yadayada. However, if you put it in historical perspective, Sephiroth is just Yet-Another-Angel-Final-Boss (YAAFB?).
Kefka was the man. The only thing that makes Sephiroth a better character was the Cloud Flashback in the secon disc, and his music (I'll take One winged angel over dancing mad any day, but I also like a lot Dancing Mad).
Kefka roolz. And can kick Sephiroth ass any day of the week
Mmm, I don't think so.
:) :), and was f*cking invincible AND repetitive. No contest.
-Summons: The FF6 summons weren't as broken as in FF7. Yeah, they were powerful, but not so much. Even of you didn't got Knight of the Round, you could easily grab Odin, which was also very good (yeah, KOTR killed everything in sight, but Odin wasn't bad).
-Bad Ending: at least the characters talked in FF6! FF7 left you hanging there! Makes me think about Neal Stephenson...
The best FF ending I have witnessed was the one from FF8. FF5 was good also.
-Way too easy: FF6 was easy, but not to the point FF7 reached. On the FF7 side, I can say that it had cool secrets bosses (Weapons).
-Horrible load times: FF7 was for the LoadStation. FF6 was a SNES cartridge. nuff said.
-Long cutscenes: The longest one in FF6 was the opera. It was pretty cool, though. FF7 had cool scenes, however, I have played it twice, and I am not thinking about playing it a third time, unless a good remake comes (why doesn't Square Enix learn the Enix way of remakes?...DQ remakes have been all cool). FF6 will be played again as soon as I found myself without a good new game
-Tiring Battles: Mmm, I remeber my main FF6 party, of Cyan, Celes, Sabin and Setzer (gotta love coin throw!), was always on the verge of dying. Every battle was intense, but yeah, repetitive. FF7 Main Party was Cloud, Cid and Yuffie (that way you got the best lines
Don't take me wrong. I like FF7, but I don't think it was the best rpg ever.
I don't think I have played such a game yet, but there are some favs: DQ6, FF6, Chrono Trigger, FF Tactics (NOT the advance version, which is horrible!), Breath of Fire 3. Yeah, I haven't played some of the latest great things. Maybe I will buy a PS2 if the DQ5 remake gets a translation.
Do yourself a favor. Grab a emulator, the Dragon Quest 6 Rom and the NoPrgress patch , and play one of the greates snes rpgs.
Yeah, and you forget the fact that the protagonists (Avalanche) ARE terrorist, doesn't help either.
The first FF I played was FFVII. However, after liking a lot said game, I went back, and played the older ones. I have played FFI (never finished that one...is way too primitive), FFIV (hyped by nostalgic fans; good if you like basic rpgs), FFV (good game, a shame that west skipped this one) and FFVI (f*cking great game).
:), and a great ending. However, you couldn't care less about the villain (Ultimecia? who the heck was her...pseudo-spoiler: some people say she was Rinoa), and the magic system was broken. I liked FF7 best.
FFVI is my fav. The history is great, the fact that you could select (at some point of the history) which group of characters follow, and a lot of other small details that help making the story a little less linear, make it a winner.
Yeah, FFVII was good, but:
-Had a lot of long cutscenes.
-Summons were way too powerful (and boring. Here is a hint: play the game without ever using summons, and the game quality will go up a little)
-Way too easy (even without summons).
-Very linear game.
-Worst. Ending. Ever.
-Horrible load times for battles.
-The battles were tiring. (When I was reaching the end of the second disc, I started playing without volume, because the battle theme was driving me mad).
The bottom line: great story, and 3D characters against good (at the time) 2D backgrounds don't
FF8 fixed the summoning problem (replacing it with the renzokuken problem, which was worst.
Does this means that if the judge "settles" that Darl spends his next 10 years in jail, he actually gets 4 years, and the lawyers get 6 years?
Sounds good to me...
Most politicians are lawyers.
Cryptonomicon. (a book by Neal Stephenson)
I get it now. Cool sig.
Have you read Asimov's lost masterpiece? [homeip.net]
How is "The end of the eternity" a lost masterpiece? I readed it a lot of years ago, and, while I agree it is a great book, it is by no means "lost". That sounds like the book was found recently and published postmortem.
I don't get it.
Yeah, you remember, but DO YOU HAVE PROOF of this prior art?
I thought so.
Nintendo lawyers will contact you.
Sound familiar? Back in the day, ALL cameras were made of a metal body. You could blugeon someone to death with your camera and it would still be alright to take the murder scene photos afterwards. You can't do that with today's plastic cameras.
And not being able to kill someone with your camera is bad because...?
Buy a knife, hammer or gun. Most do-it-all devices don't do anything well at all.
* Capcom was making noise at one point about an MMORPG based on the Ghouls & Ghosts & Goblins/Gargoyle's Quest/Demon's Crest universe. What happened to that?
It wasn't a MMORPG, just an online game, like the next Resident Evil for PS2. I readed a preview once. Don't know what happened.
They are trying to broadcast the wrong game. They should try and cover one of those crazy street fighter tournaments. There are a lot of advantages:
-Game is better suited to espectators.
-Real skill can be noticed.
-Every game seems different.
-You can actually say "woah, that combo was cool", grab your console and try it. All the skill in a FPS leads to teamwork (hard to see for a spectator anyway) or aim. Aiming is boring as hell. Yeah you can kill a pixel miles away. It doesn't look cool if you aren't doing it.
Smash Bros Melee is also a good option. Tekken, Virtua Fighter too.
If in the process of building your app you find and fix a bug in the image library, wouldn't it make sense for you to send a patch upstream and be done with it forever? Otherwise, every time you upgraded you'd have to fix the same stupid bug again, taking time away from more fruitful work.
Perhaps someone can clarify for me a) whether I explained that OK and b) whether that is actually what happens in the real world with BSD projects?
It is a valid argument. I don't know how frequently this happens, but it is almost sure it happens sometimes.
And if PB DOES get it's foot in the door, it could prove to be more profitable to CB than PA is to CA. Because PA would have to be GPLed, CA really couldn't charge too much for it, or another entity could just purchase it and start distributing it itself for free or for profit. It's why Windows XP Home is $200, OS X personal is $130, but Red Hat Linux personal was only $40, Mandrake is $100, and SuSE is $30, despite the Linux distributions coming with programs that do everything under the sun. If they charged more, people would just say "the heck with this, I'm downloading it", while vendors such as Apple and MS can afford to charge a lot more because working pirated versions are harder to get a hold of (not much, but they are harder) and are illegal.
Linux-on-the-desktop is a completely different discussion. I don't think it is ready for it, and don't think that will be in the near future. However, your point is a valid one. However, even if CA (GPLed...damn that lousy notation I used) goes out of business, it will take a lot of work to recover the PA's marketshare back to CB.
So again, I don't really think that it comes down to anything more than just a philosophical discussion of what you want people to be able to do with your code. If you don't care if a company uses it without compensation, I think the BSD license makes more sense. If you do care, and want anyone who takes advantage of your code to return the favor, the GPL is more suited to you.
I don't think it is just a philosophical decision. I just made an example of why it is an advantage to the programmer to release under GPL vs release under BSD.
There isn't a US law banning the use of keys longer than X-bits? Then, US should ban faster computers!:)
But most people learned to code to post on wacko news sites!
There always going to be collisions in check-sums. If that weren't the case than we wouldn't need to distribute actual files, just check-sums.
You just ruined a GREAT and REVOLUTIONARY compression algorithm!!!
Where this gets dicey, though, is if MySQL contains any code which is owned by someone else. For example, if I make an improvement to MySQL, and they incorporate it into a newer version, they could not release it under any license other than the GPL without my approval, unless they were to remove my code.
AFAIK, the MySQL company buys back any contribution they seem fit to integrate into the MySQL project, so it is most probable that they are the sole owners of MySQL.
Strange quirks like this are one of the reasons why the FSF asks people to give the copyright of code over to them rather than to have all of the individual programmers retain copyright.
This also makes a lot of people uneasy about the FSF. I didn't heard about this, and now I am also uneasy
I'm not sure what I've misconceived here.
A project released under the GPL stays under the GPL. No retroactive licensing may be applied to the code. This does not prevent me (the author/copyright owner) from re-licensing the code under any other license that I deem useful.
Yeah, but since the original author still retains copyright over the work, he has the right to say, from this point on, this work will be completely closed source. The older versions, are still GPLd, and someone else may take over manteinership.
In the situation that I released under GPL and then took the code back immediately before anyone had a chance to gain access to it, my GPL'ing of the code is essentially moot. It would be as if I had never released the code under the GPL.
In practice, yes.
I'm of the opinion that, in your scenario, company CA would, had they based their project off of PB instead of PA, likely released their code anyway.
:%s/doesn't make sense/it is not such a great idea/gI
likely is the keyword here. likely != certain. And I would even say that "posible" is the adequate word here.
Most companies are going to be too anti-OSS to use PB.
??? I'm going to guess you wanted to say PA here, which would mean that most companies won't want to be in the obligation to redistribute their code under the GPL.
Again, in your example, say PB (the BSD one) didn't exist and CA and CB were left with only the option of using PA (GPLed). I put to you that company CB would probably not use the project anyway, and either purchase one or write their own.
In which case PA would be likely (yeah, this time it is not so sure) first-to-market, their product would be better and cheaper, while PB would have no chance to compete. Again, this will not be necesarily true all the time, but I think that most of the time, it would be true.
Anyway, saying that either GPL or BSD doesn't make sense seems silly to me; it's a personal decision.
(I guess "doesn't make sense" is a little extreme)
I don't think releasing the GPL actually encourages many contributions, as most of the time companies would just turn away to other solutions.
Think of linux on business world vs FreeBSD on business world. I know, I know, for a lot of reasons, Linux got more spotlight when critical decisions were taken, but I don't think that the license was a minor one.
I could even make the argument that BSD licences would help push OSS. Propriatary products incorporate the BSD'd code, and improve from it. The improvement from these spur new motivation and ideas to develop the open source software.
What if the propietary modifications are under some wacky patent, and you can't emulate them. And consider the fact that a lot of work will be lost on reinventing the wheel (IF it is legally posible), and that most probably the original propietary modifications will be dropped in favor of the BSD'd ones, losing a lot of time for the propietary developers. You can avoid all those pitfalls by using GPL (or your favorite, copyleft compliant equivalent)
A) I'm still waiting. And waiting. Think of the publicity if Microsoft went and embraced and extended my stuff. But it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Heck, if they're still dragging their heels in their drive to steal and proprietarize FreeBSD, Apache and X.org, what hope do I have as a tiny guy with a tiny project?
Who said Microsoft? (Yeah, maybe I did..., maybe I didn't. Can't bother to check)
B) What's wrong with *using* stuff for profit? Doesn't the GPL say it doesn't regulate and restrict *use* of the software? Or were you thinking of another license?
Nothing.
C) Think of all the poor GPL developers who are still waiting to be paid by Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, IBM, HP, SGI, Sun, etc. Is it somehow okay for some companies to exploit Free Software developers, but not for others? I'm sure you'll say you meant something else, but your unconscious slip gave you away.
I think of them. Maybe they would be better starting their own companies. (Yeah, maybe not).
Try to read what I write very carefully before you respond again.
...However, if this "unrepaying" use of open source code enables the developers it hires to contribute to some other open source code in their spare time, then the open source community gets something (else) back.
:)
...hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry. Therefore, the interaction between the open source community and commercial entities is not as simple as the original post made it to be.
Is this a subtle insult?
That is a lot of "if's". IF the developers contribute to some project. IF the projects actually gets further than a "pre-alpha" on Source Forge. IF the project is actually something useful. IF the project doesn't die out of lack of interest.
On the other hand, a Company develops GPL project. Open Source Community get something back. Direct. Real. Tangible (well, as tangible as source code can get
I didn't mean to imply the hypothetical company was benevolent. I'm saying that greedy companies can hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry.
Companies are greedy by definition. It would be a great thing to use that greed to enhance the open source community.
If you take a BSD licensed project, modify and sell it, that is not an open sourced project. The discussion here is about making money while contributing to the open source community. There are business (big business indeed) that are contributing to open source AND creating jobs. With GPL-like licenses. They do it this way, because if they used BSD style licenses, other companies would come and just take away from IBM, and give nothing back.
If you are on the creative side, you are better with the GPL. If you are on the side who wants to just take someone else work and sell it as yours, you can't do better than promote BSD.
Numerically, I expect the gross majority of open source developers to have day jobs at greedy companies that far prefer BSD licensed code to GPL code. The growth of either does not imply the downfall of the other, because the two entities feed off each other. To say that BSD code does nothing for the open source community is probably as wrong as saying free software kills commercial software vendors.
I expect that too. However, do note your use of the word "prefer". Most people "prefer" getting something for nothing, but most must get something for something else, and those companies will be forced to use GPL, even if they prefer to use BSD. I don't think that at any point in the future, all software will be GPL'd, BSD'd (no, not blue screen of death'd) xor closed source.
However I do expect a rise of companies that use and create projects based on GPL, versus the downfall of companies that just take BSD projects, modify and sell them, being the primary reason of this that the number of projects using BSD will fall, and the fact that their closed source products will be worse. And I don't think that companies who sell software THEY created, will ever release it under BSD. Well, there are a lot of wackos out there.
It's not really that simple. Take a large piece of software that would cost millions to build commercially, such as Linux, for example. Assume that BSD (the OS, not the license) did not exist as an alternative. A company that could not use Linux without keeping its additions secret may simply not pursue the entire product, because it's too expensive to build otherwise. A company that chose to use BSD OS might go ahead with the product and hire 20 developers,...
Why would the company want to keep the additions secret? Yeah, there are a lot of valid reasons, but once they fail to release the modifications they made, guess what, it is not an open source project anymore, EVEN if it is based on a open sourced project. So it falls out of the discussion. BSD-like licenses do NOT help the open source community. GPL-like licenses DO.
who might then contribute to other open source projects in their spare time.
Yeah, I guess all those MPAA head honchos donate to charity and the FSF on their free time. Yes, I know that most open source projects are started in someone's spare time. But the article is about making money while doing open source projects, not making money and contributing to open source projects in spare time.