20 Dec
2005
20 Dec
'05
1:10 p.m.
Over time, be became aware that multiple companies
in China were
downloading his webserver and embedding the software into commerical
products. Since these companies did not negotiate an alternative license to
the GPL, they were then bound to the GPL license and my friend would have
been within his rights to buy a unit and demand the source code. His
chances of actually *getting* said source code were nil. The Chinese
companies don't care and it would have been prohibitively expensive for him
to sue. Since his intent was to make money off the codebase (and he spent a
few years working on the software [3]---following the HTTP spec [4] isn't
easy and there are some rather interesting corner cases).
So what did he do? The next release was no longer under the GPL. You
want the code, you have to buy it [5].
This kind of thing is why I won't use the GPL. In my case, I only care about
free as in beer, and if I'm not making a buck off of my creation, neither
should you. GPL doesn't prohibit this, and so it's unsuitable for my purposes.
On the other hand, it should also be pointed out that the Chinese crooks in
this case probably wouldn't have cared what license it came over. Unethical
people don't let a little thing like a license stand in their way.
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Anything that can be put into a nutshell belongs there. -- F. G. Brauer ----