GPL vs. other licenses

[Tim Mann]

As the maintainer of a program that's partly under the GPL, I'd like
to wade in on this licensing discussion.

My own view on free software is this: If someone wants to write
software and give it away for free use by anyone, he should be able to
do that. If he wants to keep it proprietary and charge for the right
to use it, he should be able to do that.

Personally, when I write software that I want to give away, I am happy
for anyone to use it in any way they please. If they want to take
some of my code and incorporate it along with some of their work into
a commercial, proprietary product, that does not bother me. If I'm
giving code away, I'm giving it to everyone, not only to other people
who also want to give their code away. If someone uses my code in a
proprietary product that does not supply enough added value to make it
worth the price and to compensate for the source not being available,
then people will just use my free version instead. No one can stop
them from doing this if I retain the copyright on it and grant them
the necessary rights. (See the X consortium license and the BSD
license for examples of how this is done.)

This is not Richard Stallman's view. He says that the copyright law
is immoral. All software should be free, regardless of whether the
person who wrote it wants it to be free or not. The GPL is written in
order to advance this view. It does not just say that GPL'd code will
always be available for free. It goes beyond this, and says that if
GPL'd code is modified or pieces are incorporated into another
program, the entire new program *must* also be given away under the
GPL.

The net effect of this is that GPL'd code is less widely useable than
code that is given away under less restrictive licenses. For example,
I maintain a chess GUI for X and MS Windows. Several friends of mine
who are writing proprietary or shareware chess software have asked
permission to use some of the code from my program in their products.
I would have been glad to do this, because I wrote the code for
everyone to use, and I would have been particularly pleased to help my
friends in their efforts. But I had to say no, because I've assigned
copyright in my code to the FSF and put it under the GPL, so no one
can use it in another program without putting the entire program under
the GPL.

I believe this is the reason that SRC Modula-3 is not under the GPL.
The developers of SRC Modula-3 want it to have the widest possible
distribution. They don't want to discourage anyone from using it,
even those (evil according to Stallman) people or companies that make
proprietrary software.

Personally, I will never put code under the GPL again.

--Tim Mann