> Would you grant me the freedom to give away your commercial > product for free > or to incorporate it in my commercial product? Probably not. You'd instead > grant me less freedom. The GPL protects me from this.
Except it doesn't. With or without the GPL, if he still makes his commercial product, you will still be unable to give it away or incorporate it in your commercial product. If he doesn't make it, that's just less choice for everyone. It may be a poorer product. It may cost him more to develop it. It may wind up not existing. But in no case will will you wind up with the freedom to give away his commercial product. So the GPL actually won't protect you from this at all. It will just result in him producing a poorer, more expensive, less compatible product -- or none at all. Either way, everyone else will have fewer (and/or poorer) choices. Everyone loses. Nobody wins. Note that had he been able to incorporate the GPL code in his commercial product, he may have passed bug fixes and improvements back to the GPL project. He would not have had to, of course, but if his product just uses a GPL component or library (that doesn't compete with the larger product), there's no reason for him not to. Everybody could have won. It's always possible he may instead elect to make a GPL'd project. This may allow him to produce a higher-quality product in less time. It may allow others to build on his work, and result in more freedom for everyone. He may make less money, but maybe not. The question of whether the "everybody loses" or the "lots of people, maybe everybody, wins" case is more common is an empiric one. I have seen an awful lot of "everybody loses" cases. I've seen very few "everybody wins" cases. DS
