4 ms·

I think it's a well-written article, but he fails to acknowledge the economic principle of free-riders. I think it destroys his argument. http://en.wikipedia.

• davidw 17y ago
  One non-GPL solution is to have a very broad group of people who rapidly develop the open version. Think Apache or Postgres. Sure, you could hire a developer or two and make a closed version, but that person will end up spending all their time merging in the open source changes, which will outpace whatever value they can add to the closed product. In theory, at least - and I think that sort of strategy works in practice too, in some situations. And therein is the key - there are no general answers - some projects are better under a GPL style license where everyone knows that no one is going to 'take the code and run', and others are not.