6 Reasons To License Software Under the (A/L)GPL 367
Henry V .009 writes with a link to Zed Shaw's "newest rant," which gives a cogent description of his reasons for choosing the not-always-popular GPL for his own code: "Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you're using? How many of you tell investors that your entire operation is based on something one guy wrote in a few months? How many of you out there go to management and say, 'Hey, you know there's this guy Zed who wrote the software I'm using, why don't we hire him as a consultant?' You don't. None of you. You take the software, and use it like Excalibur to slay your dragon and then take the credit for it. You don't give out any credit, and in fact, I've ran into a vast majority of you who constantly try to say that I can't code as a way of covering your ass."
The GPL isn't telling them squat (Score:2, Informative)
They told themselves by taking this GPL'd code and reading the license (that allows them to take the code) and agreeing that their code should be licensed under the GPL too.
If you take the lines wholly copyrighted by you and put then in another project, YOU CAN.
The GPL isn't telling you how to license your code. It's telling you the terms if making a derived work from others' code.
Re:Not really for that (Score:3, Informative)
The original NT stack was BASED ON BSD code, it was not a copy and paste of the BSD code with no modifications.
So ... YES, the original code is still free, in fact parts of it are in use in the OSes my OpenBSD firewalls use as well as my FreeBSD web servers.
And also, NO, you can't get the original NT stack because its not JUST BSD code, its BSD code modified to fit into Windows.
The original code is still just as free as it was from day one, the MS modifications however are not. No freedom to anything that already existed was lost, no one took any freedom away. They simply didn't give out their work for free.
Not sure why thats so hard to grasp.
Re:Awww, What Happened to Badass Zed? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, for instance, there's lots and lots of VB6 code out there that became obsolete when MS dropped it. The .NET version is different enough that large apps can't be translated and need to be rewritten.
Actually VB6 code is still getting written even today, but it's a dangerous proposition. There's no guarantee it'll run on future Windows versions. Especially there's no guarantee that the OCX you need will work on future Windows version.
COBOL is an exception because it was used in important systems developed entirely in-house with full source available.
But VB6 isn't like that. A vast majority of programs need some OCX or another that performs a crucial task. And the VB code itself is just glue (something every VB book likes to point out). Many VB apps are completely uninteresting and say, use an OCX to interface with some specialized piece of hardware, another OCX to present data (some fancy grid control for instance), and a database. If any of that stops working, you're screwed. And chances are those companies that made that stuff are now gone or uninterested in maintaining it.
Compare for instance, Perl or C. Perl isn't that popular anymore, but it's still actively worked on. Even if development stopped, the source would still be there.
Re:Don't know, don't care (Score:1, Informative)
I never heard of any of this guy's software, I don't use it, and I don't care. Sounds like he has an inflated sense of his own importance.
Sounds like you have an inflated sense of how many software projects you've heard of. His software -is- widely used -
http://www.google.com/search?q=mongrel
get a grip...
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)