iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Chad Leigh -- ObjectWerks Inc]

On Jul 1, 2007, at 11:58 PM, Anthony Morton wrote:

>
>> 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.
>
> And it's strange that you give OS X as an example - this is a case  
> where Apple undertakes 'forced management' by keeping all  
> development closed and in-house.  And the approach mostly works.

You totally misunderstood my point.  This is not "open source" versus  
"proprietary", this is GPL versus more free OSS licenses.

You complained that Patricks example of an OSS license that allowed  
private companies to take the code and improve it resulted in an  
example of open source going closed source.

First of all, that is not true.  In Patrick's example, the original  
open source version is still open source.  The only thing that has  
become closed source were the proprietary company's "improvements"  
and enchancements.

My example of planned economy (GPL) was in contrast to open market /  
free market economy (BSD license), not OSS versus Proprietary.  OS X  
is a great example where Apple took its own Proprietary code (what  
became Cocoa, Carbon, and other bits) and married it to open source  
and OSS (I list it both ways as I am not entirely familiar with the  
Mach licences) like Mach, FreeBSD, and various other open source code  
(samba, Sun's DTrace and ZFS, etc) and made a much better solution.   
Parts of which are proprietary.  Mach, FreeBSD user layer, and all  
the other oss bits Apple used are still open source, but the whole  
that Apple assembled is not but is a much better product than the  
pure free software GPL people have been able to come up with.

Your comments about Apple etc are way off base.  They manage their  
own projects of course, but that is their right.  But they did NOT  
hijack the open source projects they use and indeed contribute much  
back to them.  Those Open Source projects still exist.

>
> At the same time you have open-source projects like Apache and TeX,  
> and GCC and Emacs, and even Wikipedia, that are also carefully  
> managed, but as open projects with diverse contributors.  This  
> approach also works.

I never claimed open source didn't work.  I merely likened the GPL to  
a planned economy way of managing things compared to true free  
software licenses like BSD.

>
> Let me put it more capitalistically.  If you're the creator of a  
> piece of software and you want to take it open-source but retain  
> control over it, you don't want your competitors to take advantage  
> of the IP you've just magnanimously made public in order to take  
> away your market share.  So a GPL-style licence works as a kind of  
> patent, that allows others to benefit from your stuff while you  
> retain control over your IP.

No you don't. They can fork it and do with it whatever they want.   
They have to make the result GPL but you don't have control over it.

> At the same time it's unlike a patent in that there are no  
> restrictions on who can use your stuff, and your competitors pay  
> you not in cash but in kind, by publishing improvements that can be  
> fed back into the project.

Uhh, see above.

>
> The alternative, if you want to maintain control over your IP, is  
> of course the traditional approach where you don't publish  
> anything.  Should I presume those who call the GPL 'communist' or  
> 'anti-competitive' because of its restrictions have a similar  
> attitude to developers who don't publish their source code?

Some people find a great advantage to contributing source code,  
others rather keep it proprietary.  That is their prerogative.  The  
GPL is "communistic" in that it tries to exert control over MY IP if  
I happen to build on other's shoulders (who submitted their work to  
be used by others, not stolen).  True free software licenses don't do  
that.   GPL us RMS's wet dream come true for his control freak  
ideology while others work on truly free software like the BSD  
licensed stuff.

Chad

>
> Tony M.
>