LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : ansell@chariot.net.au
  Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 21:46:05 +0930

Re: star office disaster on horizon

Tim,

Thanks for that.
I had forgotten about that Gnome word processor project.
I found also GO:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~clahey/software/
and a gnome presentation program:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/david-crosson-w3/gnome-diagram.html
which is at version 0.0.1 or something.

It's a real danger, though, that these true
Open Source projects are at an early stage, and the
work that goes into them could easily
be discouraged by the (current) easy availability
of star office. If there were no such semi-free
programs around, the stimulus for the OS projects
would be greater.

A similar situation is Netscape, which as far as
I know, could be removed from its current free status,
and further developments could be completely
commercial, or some big evil company could buy it
out and just stop or cripple its development.

My point is that these "gifts" like Netscape and
Star Office can easily be taken back or sabotaged.

In a sense, giving SO or NS away for free is not
all that different to giving away IE for free --
they both have the effect of taking the energy out
of parallel OS projects.

The prospect of this sort of scenario, which would
indeed be a good way for the MS and Sun MS to
beat linux by undercutting OS efforts, starts to make
me realise the true value of the GPL licence.
Even the BSD and Artistic Licences seem to me to be
vulnerable in that the owner of the software can be
paid money for the software, and the new owner can
make derived works which cost money and which make
the original work obsolete.

I.e. if I'm not wrong, the GPL makes it impossible
for an OS project to be captured by a hostile party.
But I'm not really sure about that.....

Q1:	Is the GPL really immune to hostile takeover?
Q2:	Are the BSD and Artistic licences really
	vulnerable to hostile takeover?
Q3:	What's the difference between a
	"modified work" and a "derived work"?
	(I ask this because I think that BSD lets you create
	non-free derived works, while GPL does not.

[Maybe I should ask Richard Stallman next time he drops in.]

Regards,
Alan Kennington.

=======================================================
PS.  My personal set of linux and IT news links is:
http://www.topology.org/itnews.html

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