On Wed, 25 Dec 2002 13:54:31 +0530 Kapil Karekar wrote:
- The Free S/w philosophy should be applied completely when s/w
is being developed by government agencies. Except in cases where national security interests are concerned the source for all s/w developed should be freely available. The money that the
It's not necessary to distribute free software at all, and making the source code available is mandated only if the software is to be distributed. GoI can very well keep it's secret software and associated source code with itself. If GoI later plans to distribute some of it's secret software, there's no particular reason why the source code to it should be hidden. Free Software != source code available for public download. Not always.
development. How can a company ensure that the source code for the product developed after years of work is not copied by some other company. S/w hijackers can just lift snippets of code from the available sorce code and make a s/w of there own. This would eat away the market for the original company.
This can not be ensured with closed source either. Reverse engineering is one way people breach closed source too. The motive to hijack source code may be strong for small-time developers developing small-time applications. For large corporations, fear of legal action is a large enough deterrent.
Secondly, for a company to make a complex piece of software based on an already complex piece of software (say a web-server based on code hijacked from the Apache Project) and to make enough improvements to it make it's proprietary product more desirable, the company would have to make a lot many changes to the code.
In the process the code would become sufficiently different from the original codebase and the company won't have anyone to turn to for support since benefits/changes applicable to free project code no longer apply to the hijacked codebase. Thus the company would have to train it's own coders to understand the hijacked codebase. AFA my personal experience goes, it is easier to code from scratch than understand an existing piece of code inside-out for complex systems.
Also, in the 18 year long history of GNU and FSF's existence not a single case of someone creating a proprietary project that trumped a Free Software project whose code it hijacked has come to the fore. Well, the TCP/IP stack in MS Windows is another story, which is why it is highly advisable to go for "Protective Freedom" through licenses like GPL.