On Jan 16, 2004, at 7:39 PM, Trent Shipley wrote:
>
>> As developer of GPL software, I refuse to call if 'Free Software' for
>> reasons that that I hope to make plain, I can assure you that the GPL
>> does not prevent your software from being hijacked for commercial
>> gain.
>> If that's what you want, I strongly recommend the RPL.
>
> What is the RPL?
Reciprocal Public License
<
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/rpl.php>
I may as well tell my sad story. A few years ago I helped a friend
write some software for the relatively poor school district where his
wife was teaching. Being naive, we put it under the GPL. A couple of
years later we discovered that another school district had paid a
programmer to add all kinds of bells and whistles to our programs. We
approached that district for a copy of the derived work only to be told
'tough shit'. Why should we help the kids in your poor district compete
with the kids in our rich district.
We went to a lawyer who told us that we were screwed. Since the
district that had modified our code was not distributing the
modifications outside their district, they didn't have to make them
public.
Once something like that happens to you, you tend to notice stories
about it happening elsewhere. So I have heard lots of stories about
where others got caught in the same trap. And of course, there are
probably lots of cases where someone derives a program from a GPLed
program and uses it for commercial advantage but no one ever finds out
because they don't publicize it. It was precisely this problem that led
to the creation of the RPL. The GPL says you have to make you source
available when you distribute your code but you can deploy it
throughout an organization, no matter how large, as a closed source
binary. The RPL draws the line at personal use.
Today, if I don't care whether the people who use my code give anything
back, I use the AFL. When I do care I use the RPL.
I guess it shows that I still really care about this stuff. Thanks for
listening.
BTW - This story has a happy ending. Tim Hogan of AZ Center for Law in
the Public Interest, one of the few lawyers who is such a genuinely
good person that he is almost a saint, got the whole discrepancy
between dollars per student in different school districts declared
unconstitutional.
(text/plain)