On 14 Mar 2007, at 17:01, Robert Dober wrote:
> On 3/14/07, Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@games-with-brains.com> wrote:
>> What this all boils down to at core is this: both BSD and GPL folks
>> are good, decent people. BSD folks like to give gifts to the
>> individual developer whilst GPL folks prefer to give their gifts to
>> the community of end-users - without the former the world would have
>> a lot fewer clever developers, and without the latter we'd all be
>> stuck with proprietary tools of dubious provenance.
>
> Well that pretty much sums it up very nicely, does this mean that I
> have not understand the feudal stuff above???

Apparently not. My reference to feudalism was to the notion of a  
social contract, which essentially is what the GPL defines, in which  
rights derive from a single point of unquestionable moral authority  
and everyone else has a clearly delineated role with attendant rights  
and obligations. For the GPL's purpose this is exactly how things  
should be.

>> Which of the two groups any one of us falls in at any given time
>> surely depends on what we're hoping to achieve with our current  
>> project?
> Exactly I might chose BSD because I really do not want to "protect" my
> source code or I might use GPL because I want :)

Yes, which is why it's foolish of people to take a religious stance  
one way or the other. Personally I've never used the GPL for a  
project, but I don't value my code that much. However if I was  
working on something that would require months or years of costly  
development the GPL might be an ideal way to have my cake and eat it:  
open source so end-users can be confident my product is good, but a  
license that keeps me in control.

>> raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason
>
> Stack overvlow ;)

Guess we're still in beta then ;)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason