Craig Dickson wrote: <snip>
While the heading is wrong (blatant FUD), it still would seem the the focus of the proposed bill is not to encourage licences that are less restrictive than the GPL. On the contrary it suggests that the government sell the government(public) IP to companies and let them do what they want with it.As to the present topic, the NewsForge/Slashdot headlines about a congressman wanting to "outlaw the GPL" are misleading and inflammatory -- dishonest journalism at its worst. As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with outlawing the GPL. The issue is deciding on a license to recommend or mandate for use with software that is developed under government funding. That's a legitimate issue. Software developed by the government, or under government contract, ideally should be considered to be in the public domain; the government, representing the people, paid for its development, so one could reasonably argue that it should be freely reusable by any American citizen for any purpose, including incorporating it into proprietary products, developing proprietary extensions, etc. On the other hand, one could argue that the GPL is the best way of ensuring that this publicly-funded software is used to the maximal benefit of the people as a whole. Which side of the debate one takes is likely to be predictable from one's general view of the free software movement, but neither position seems inherently right or wrong to me.My view is that the GPL is a bit too strong for publicly-funded code, but BSD/X is a bit too weak, since, as I understand them, they do not discourage Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy. Something closer to the LGPL might do the job nicely. You should be able to use publicly-funded code in closed-source products, but alterations to the publicly-funded code should be required to be released under the same license as the original code. This would allow everyone to use the code for any purpose, but prevent "embrace and extend" takeovers. Craig
I think the best solution would be to mandate that code be released publicly under the GPL, and also allow code to be sold to companies on a non-exclusive basis under a non-GPL license that allowed them to modify and sell the modified product as they wish. This allows companies to value-add and onsell, while still allowing the public to have access to the publicly funded work, without the proprietary modifications. There is nothing stopping the author of a piece of code from releasing under multiple licences. (Provided their work isn't based on previous GPL'd work they don't own of course).
Barney
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