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> Isn't one of the advantages of the Internet bringing developers together to work on things? Can't we put our collective capabilities toward improving things i
by hxa7241 16y ago
> Isn't one of the advantages of the Internet bringing developers together to work on things? Can't we put our collective capabilities toward improving things instead of rewriting them from scratch simply because they're not our favorite license or favorite language?
Well, that is pretty much the purpose of GPL, isn't it. It sets up a co-operative rule: if you want to gain from GPL software, then you must give something back, and that is to let other people gain from your additions. It is better to co-operate, and GPL reifies that instinct into a legal form to give it a bit more strength.
- rbanffy 16y agoNot exactly. He may gain from the use of the GPL and give nothing back if he doesn't pass along his software based on GPL software. In that sense, the focus of the GPL is not the upstream developer, but the downstream user. That's more or less what happened at the start of WebKit. Apple got KHTML, changed a lot of its inhards and published the whole thing back when Safari was launched. A lot of KHTML developers complained Apple's code was very Mac-specific and a pain to integrate back into KHTML.