[PLUG] Proprietary Software & the GPL

Bill Spears bspears at easystreet.com
Fri Dec 6 15:24:11 UTC 2002


On Friday 06 December 2002 12:48 pm, you wrote:
> On 6 Dec 2002, Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> > I bet there's a signifcant number of college students who would benefit
> > greatly if you slapped a GPL on it and announced it.  Or is that kind of
> > library fairly easy to write, as an excersise for the student?
>
>   What? Are text books given away, too? Back when I was on university
> faculty my students found benefit from purchasing their text books --
> particularly when they came in for an exam. Why aren't all technical books
> distributed for free under the GDL? Why should we have to actually BUY a
> book on free software? How unfair!
>
>   Sorry, Karl, but I don't take guilt trips. My mother's tried for decades
> and I just won't go there. :-)
>
> Rich (cynical, capitalist curmudgeon)
>
>

Rich,
    1. Seems to me that fuzzy stuff has been out there  a long time now and 
there very likely is some open stuff in some stage of development.  For 
example, I once did a baby system in Python.  If you don't worry about or 
postpone the syntactic sugar it's not very hard to do.
   2.  Keep in mind you can often split the problem into _data_ and a control 
system.  The thing you would want to keep proprietary would be the data you 
develop.  Sharing the development of the control system with other users in 
other knowledge domains would benefit you.
  3. If you developed a mixed system, you could allow your clients to access 
it as clients to your server which you would keep and maintain on site.  
Supporting in software is not something you want to do.




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