Python is better than free (was Re: GNU wars again)

[Gerhard Häring]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2001 at 12:54:48PM +1000, Delaney, Timothy wrote:
> My preferences lie very strongly with BSD-style licenses (basically,
> do what you want with this). I personally feel that code should be
> available to be used in whatever way someone wants. This is not to say
> that all code should be without charge - depending on what it is, I
> would be quite willing to pay a (one-off) fee to be able to *then* do
> whatever I wanted with the code (with some caveats - I would not
> expect to be able to distribute code in unmodified form if it required
> a fee for me to obtain it in the first place).

I agree completely. I can imagine reasons why one would prefer to
license something under the GPL, apart from believing into that Free
Software stuff: if you want to make money from alternative licensing
forms. But *please*, then indicate that you are willing to license the
code under a commercial license, and *pleae* be clear what the price of
this is. I hate the usual ACT, Cygnus, Transvirtual, whatever statements
along the line "We offer alternative licensing forms. Please contact our
sales department." Ugh. I won't.

> I find the GPL is one of the best ways to ensure that your code will not be
> used by other people.

Yup. I avoid it almost always. I've never tried to make money off my
Open Source code, but I want it to stay free, not "Free".

I don't have problems with GPL'ed utilities, but I do have a big problem
with GPL'ed libraries. These are very annoying, IMNSHO. If they're
actually useful (most of them aren't), sooner or later somebody will
rewrite them under a BSD license or just in-house, anyway. So it only
leads to duplicated effort.

What I hate most is that kneejerk-use-of-GPL I see in all those little
Open-Source projects. GPL is the predominant form of licensing in the OS
world. Just go to freshmeat.net and have a look at the statistics. I
believe most of the authors don't know the implications of using the
GPL.

If it were something significant like a Python ODBC interface, I'd
understand this, but something almost trivial like a Python library that
does fast MD5 sums on files, please! (I rewrote that under a BSD
license, for example).

Gerhard
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