OT - Closing Off An Open-Source Product

[phil hunt]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2001 07:18:49 -0500 (CDT), Chris Watson <chris at voodooland.net> wrote:
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>> what if "hackers" working for a big GPL guy takes your non-GPL'd open
>> source code, makes a usually trivial change, and instead of contributing
>> the change back to the original author, they redistribute the result as
>> their own code, under GPL?
>
>It happens with the BSDL. Of course it's ALLOWED by the GPL. The BSDL is
>FREE CODE. Thats the whole point. What good is writing free code if you
>dont allow people to use it as much as possible and in as many way's as
>you can? It's not free code if they can't use it for whatever purpose.
>
>> has happened to me many times...
>> (and for some reason, non-GPL folks never do things like that.  go figure)
>
>Because the License is not free, and unrestricted. It's an embrace and
>extend tactic. They take free code and GPL it, killing its free nature.

Why is that bad, but taking free code and putting it into a closed-source
product, thus also killing its free nature, is somehow good?

-- 
*****[ Phil Hunt ***** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ]*****
"Mommy, make the nasty penguin go away." -- Jim Allchin, MS head 
of OS development, regarding open source software (paraphrased).