On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Michael Havens wrote:

>
>
> Well, looks as if I carried my joke too far.
> Yes; I  do understand open source is free for all to use  if any change that is made to the program  is freely available to all.


If you are talking about the GPL (the license for "most" Open Source
software, including apt-get) that is not true - read the GPL. The modified
source code only needs to be distributed if the modified GPL application
is distributed. Further, the modified source code only needs to be
distributed to those receiving the modified GPL application.

Simply modifying a GPL application does not always mean the modified
source code needs to be distributed, and it does not always mean the
modified source code needs to be distributed publically.

For example, a company/group/individual could take a GPL'd application,
modify it, and only use it internally for their own purposes. In this
case, they are not required to distribute their changes at all to anyone.

Some Open Source licenses (BSD comes to mind) are even less restrictive.
This is how Microsoft is able to legally use BSD's TCP stack in Windows
and they do not have to ever release their changes to anyone. Perfectly
legal, perfectly acceptable.

One may say, "Hey! That is not fair! They are stealing the BSD team's
work!" That is just not true. They are using the BSD team's code
completely within the definition of the code's license. If the BSD team
has a problem with this, they could have used a different license for
their code.

~Jay

-- 
..
..  Jay Jacobson
..  Edgeos, Inc. - 480.961.5996 - http://www.edgeos.com
..
..  Network Security Auditing and
..  Vulnerability Assessment Managed Services
..

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