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List:       ruby-talk
Subject:    Re: GUI With Ruby
From:       Eleanor McHugh <eleanor () games-with-brains ! com>
Date:       2007-03-15 0:10:00
Message-ID: 7861019B-731D-46CE-A5B9-7B6AE510BE8E () games-with-brains ! com
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On 14 Mar 2007, at 21:44, Chad Perrin wrote:
> Oooh . . . "feudal patent" is an interesting turn of phrase.  Is that
> original, or did you run across it somewhere else?  I'm curious.
>
> If it's your original material -- may I quote you with your blessing?

It's probably original in this context, although it may have some  
historical meaning that I've stomped all over: too much random  
reading... Anyway feel free to reuse it elsewhere if you find it  
useful - just don't expect any tech support lol

>> 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.
>
> I don't entirely agree with this.  The FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and
> other BSD-based OS projects prove that one need not exercise legal
> control over distribution to ensure that the open source code stays
> publicly available.  About 15,000 ports in the FreeBSD ports tree  
> see to
> that, at the very least.

I agree with you that it is possible for large open-source  
communities to thrive without the GPL, and as someone who doesn't  
choose to use it for my own projects I can't really argue in its  
favour. However it does appear to be a very effective tool for  
keeping software free where third-parties have less than honourable  
motives and the resources to act upon them.

>> 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?
>
> There's some truth in that.  Of course, what I'd really like to  
> achieve
> in a broader sense is something like a hereditary public domain --  
> once
> something goes into it, it doesn't come back out.

I'm not entirely sure how something can be legitimately removed from  
the public domain once it's in it. Which isn't to say that people  
can't use public domain property in a proprietary manner, just that  
that shouldn't impact on the ability of other people to use it in the  
public domain. However I'm probably being very naive about this.


Ellie

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



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