*BSD News Article 88310


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From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linux vs whatever
Date: 5 Feb 1997 21:04:00 GMT
Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <5dask0$13q0@usenet1y.prodigy.net>
References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <5ciraf$gs@cynic.portal.ca> <32EE0B70.1657@ml.com> <5claa2$jq1@cynic.portal.ca>
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In article <5claa2$jq1@cynic.portal.ca>,
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.portal.ca> wrote:

| It may be reasonable in some people's minds to say that if you take
| a one thousand line GPL'd program and make fifty lines of changes,
| you must give away those changes.  But I should think hardly anyone
| would think it reasonable to say that if you integrate five hundred
| lines of GPL'd source into a ten thousand line program you wrote
| yourself, you must now give away those ten thousand lines of code
| you wrote. Yet that's exactly what the GPL says.

So don't use it. And bear in mind the libraries are covered by
another license (finally).
| 
| The GPL is very un-free because the licence insists on glomming
| itself not only onto the source it came with, but any other source
| it's assocaited with; it's basically a sort of source code virus.

If you don't like it, don't use it.

| > Anyone is free to reimplement it as a non-GPLed piece
| > of code, should they be perverse enough to want to try.
| 
| As a matter of fact, that has been done. In NetBSD we now have a
| non-GPL'd zlib, and we're writing front ends for it so we can get
| rid of gzip and gunzip and the like.

That really sounds dumb. GPL doesn't say you have to give away the
operating system if you include gzip, why would you write another
program to do the same thing?
| 
| It should say something to you about the GPL when several major
| free software projects (including all the BSDs) are working so hard
| to expunge GPL'd source out of their systems.

I personally think it means a few people have taken dislike for RMS
to a new high. If you want to include GPL code in a commercial
project, or to use a bit of GPL code in your non-GPL software and
not let people use it freely. If you have gzip as part of the
distribution the GPL only affects gzip. Getting it out of a
distribution is a political statement, not a practical necessity.
--
	-bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"As a software development model, Anarchy does not scale well."
		-Dave Welch