At 10:37 PM 2/9/2002, winedev@admdev.com wrote:
In that case, it seems to me that his remarks are a complete non sequitur. The source code of "community" projects that license their work under the MIT X or BSD license is every bit as publicly available as that of projects that use the GPL.
No, they are not. On the basis that a developer is not required to pass on his code or make it available under X/BSD/etc licenses,
But a contributor to a community project, by definition, is doing so.
MANY of the best programmers on GPL or GPL-like projects are commercial programmers in real life.
This puts them at very serious risk.
Sure, you can say the GPL may taint your programming. But whats to stop you being fired because your COMMERCIAL work has influenced code you wrote for an open-source project?
If you were to donate code to a collaborative project that is similar to code that you've seen at work, there can indeed be a problem.
It is a simple fact that thousands upon thousands of commercial programmers work on open-source virally licensed projects. With no problem at all. As several people in this discussion keep asking for landmark cases to prove the effectiveness of then GPL - can you provide legal documentation pointing to GPL contamination of a commercial project?
I believe that there's a case in the courts involving MySQL right now, though I do not know all of the details.
--Brett Glass