IP: Bill makes a major error in his evaluation of the GPL

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 14:25:05 -0700
> From: Brad Templeton <brad () templetons com>
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> Subject: Bill makes a major error in his evaluation of the GPL
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
> Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad
>
>
> For IP, if you wish.
>
> ---------
>
> I'm not a big defender of the GPL, but I was a bit surprised to see
> Bill Gates say this about it today.
>
>
>         The ecosystem where you have free software and commercial
>         software--and customers always get to decide which they
>         use--that's a very important and healthy ecosystem," Gates said.
>
>         The GPL, he continued, "breaks that cycle--that is, it makes
>         it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work
>         or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or
>         Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there
>         should be free software and commercial software; there should
>         be a rich ecosystem that works around that."
>
>
> Bill seems to be missing the point that if a person writes regular
> proprietary software, as MS does, nobody can use it in products of
> any kind (free or commercial) without the author's permission.
>
> With code released under the GPL (or the other such licences) the
> author still retains all her rights to release it other ways.  She
> can, for example, sell it to Microsoft under a different licence, so
> that Microsoft can freely use it in their products, just as they could
> use code they bought from anybody.
>
> In other words, the GPL doesn't say the software can only be used in
> GPL compliant manners.  It makes this restriction only if you got
> the software via the GPL.  The author is free to release it other ways
> too.
>
> Now what Bill is perhaps decrying is that the authors don't tend to
> exercise this right, and that when the worlk of multiple authors is
> combined (as it is in Linux and many other places) one would have to
> negotiate with all of them, while in the proprietary software world
> such collaborative projects tend to be formally defined with the
> rights pooled in one place so you can buy them.  But that's not what
> he's saying.



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