3 ms·

Why GPL though? Why not MIT or Apache? Those are better IMO.

• icebraining 9y ago
  I think the question is whether one would have to pay to keep one's own works under the GPL.
  • benchaney 9y ago
    Not under this proposal, as long as you continuously updated the software. If you never payed the tax, the version from two years ago would lapse into public domain, but any maintained versions would continue to be copyrighted (or at least contained copyrighted elements) as long as effort was expended to maintain them. In theory there is nothing preventing this from happening with GPL software now, except that the length of time for something to go into public domain is so long. Edit: In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors. You only have to track down the authors who have been active in the last two years.
    • beojan 9y ago
      That still ends up with a lot of copylefted code ending up losing the copyleft protection. E.g. someone could build their proprietary product on top of a two year old Linux kernel, and not have to adhere to the GPL. > In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors. I wouldn't really call that an improvement. There's no longer even a point in relicensing code, given that the license only matters for code less than two years old.
• beojan 9y ago
  > Those are better IMO They're not. The copyleft portion of the GPL prevents improvements to open source code being locked up. In the case of source code, simply putting it in the public domain is of little use if the source code isn't public.