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From: | amicus_curious |
Subject: | Re: Is the GPL all encompassing? |
Date: | Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:46:37 -0400 |
"Rahul Dhesi" <c.c.eiftj@XReXXIsXth.usenet.us.com> wrote in message news:gb95nh$e0c$1@blue.rahul.net...
"amicus_curious" <ACDC@sti.net> writes:I say that the notion of open source in any form would do what you want here. Say, for example, the MIT License.I further say that the GPL does not add anything practically useful to thistask....There is a pretty clear philosphical difference between the MIT License and the GPL. In the case of the GPL, the copyright owner does the rough equivalent of offering a reward to others if they will agree to give something back in return. That something is to share their changes and their derivative works etc. with the world. The MIT license offers a reward to others without requiring them to give back anything. This is really nice if you wish to benefit from the work of others but give nothing back. So amicus_curious, do you wish to benefit from the work of others and give nothing back in return?
It has never really come up. I work on things that are not really susceptible to GPL claims. The only time that I have bothered with GPL code was when I was trying to interpret elements of the Adobe PDF specification and looked at the Ghostscript (?) code to see what they seemed to be doing. At that time I was investigating what might be necessary to create a C# managed code module to render PDF files in HTML as a file translation and some of Adobe's spec items were unclear to me at the time.
I find the many web sites that publish descriptive "how-to" projects as sample code to be much more useful than GPL stuff. These authors seem only interested in educating those who read their articles and rarely demand any sort of quid pro quo. Microsoft itself publishes gigabytes of tutorials and samples for this purpose.
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