iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Chad Leigh -- ObjectWerks Inc]

On Jul 1, 2007, at 10:52 PM, Anthony Morton wrote:

>
>> 2) The nifty toolbar *is* worth $100 bucks, so everybody buys the  
>> Banana Republic version.  Well, fine.  If the toolbar was worth  
>> that much, then that's what people are paying for.  If I don't  
>> like it, I guess I'd better add my own toolbar, and then we revert  
>> to case 1.
>
> Though it's not entirely 'fine' - there's a side effect whereby  
> open source software has suddenly become closed source software.
>
> Yes, the original code is still available for free, but in the real  
> world it's never as simple as an open-source version versus a  
> closed-source version that has one extra feature tacked on.  What  
> will happen is the closed-source version will continue to evolve  
> independently of the open-source version until it's barely  
> recognisable as a variant of the latter.  You can also get the  
> situation where two or more incompatible proprietary software  
> standards develop based on the same original freely-available  
> source, often creating headaches for the users.
>
> Had the original code been licensed differently, the software would  
> remain open-source throughout, and there's a greater likelihood of  
> it evolving along a single path while at all stages remaining free  
> for others to develop further.
>
> That would appear to be the motivation for the GPL: to ensure that  
> an open-source software project remains an open-source project, and  
> doesn't lose market share to possibly incompatible closed-source  
> variants just because of one nifty new feature that was used as a  
> Trojan horse to convince people to abandon the open-source version.


In other words, a planned economy (GPL) versus a free economy (BSD  
type license).  I'd rather let the market drive improvements than  
some planned / forced management of the software.

Patrick is right.

You can see the difference in the difference between Linux and OS X.   
Linux sucks as a desktop (and as anything if you ask me -- I'd rather  
run BSD on the server or Solaris 10) while OS X built on open source  
bits but made vast improvements to it all, becoming proprietary on  
those new bits, but providing a much better product.

Chad