On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Nils Kassube wrote:
To quote Dave Winer: "[The GPL is] designed to create a wall between commercial development and free development. The world is not that simple. There are plenty of commercial developers who participate in open source. Python belongs in commercial products. How does that hurt Python?"
I have multiple levels of reaction to this. The first is that you might as well have quoted Steve Balmer or Jesse Berst. Second, this quote is out of context: Dave nearly immediately backpedaled from that statement, made during a visceral reaction to something Richard Stallman wrote. Read other places where Dave indicates that the problem he had wasn't with the GPL, it's with particular agendas which are sometimes conflated with the GPL: http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$20575 [quoting Dave:] t's funny how points of view shift over time. When I was choosing an open source license for MacBird, I read the preamble to the GPL and was outraged at how it talked about commercial vendors. My takeaway was "poison pill". Then after you raised the issue, I went and took another look, thinking I would copy/paste the offensive sections to the DG to show what I meant, and I couldn't find them. I assume the GPL didn't change, clearly something about me did change. [end quote] Or his softening of his stance, written immediately after what you're quoting out of context: http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2000/09/11 [quoting Dave] Richard Stallman responds to a post on Scripting News re the controversy over Python licensing. We have different philosophies. I'm learning his now and working on mine, and it's true that there are things I don't agree with him on. I'd like to see commercial and open source developers work together more fluidly. He seems to agree. Reading his piece I think we could have an interesting discussion. I think we're on the same side on the important issues, believe it or not. (The big issue is patents, for now.) [end quote] Third, again, you're responding as though the discussion is about re-licensing all of Zope under the, which simply isn't what anyone has proposed. Again, one side suggests that no one ever write a zope product under the GPL, ever, that we all standardize on a more liberal license, and the other side simply says that each author should have the right to choose their own distribution terms.
I _do_ want to give something back to the community, but I do not want to be forced to give away for free every piece of code I wrote because some silly person thinks it's okay to earn money with everything else but it's morally wrong to earn money with software development.
Right. There's different viewpoints. You can write code and release it under your choice of licenses, and so can others. Further, this is inflamatory, it conflates RMS's agenda with the terms of the license. Remember that someone else's choice of that license may not be because they agree with the agenda: witness the ESR/RMS split: they both seem happy with the operational effect of the license, but aren't exactly on the same page about this issue of morals. Again, please explain a reason why you should dictate to every person who wants to write a zope module why they shouldn't get to have the license of their choice. My advocacy protects your choice, your advocacy destroys other peoples'. jim