On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@thenilgiris.comwrote:
so the purpose of GPL is to prevent people from making proprietary clones? I totally fail to understand the rationale behind this. If I have a plot of land, and someone encroaches on it - then I no longer have the land, unless I evict him. But software? Even if someone takes a copy and makes it closed - I still have my copy. So what do I lose? Software is not a commodity that can be bought and sold. Whether I give my software to someone, or sell it - I still have it on my repo, on my hard disk, on forks and on my backup. Why should I worry about it? --
So that people who benefit from your efforts "have to" contribute back by giving access to source code for the enhancements.
Case in point, OSX. Linux/BSD do not have a desktop environment comparable to OSX. OSX is developed on top of BSD. If BSD license had terms similar to Linux, Apple would have had to provide source code for enhancements. With that, Linux would have benefited from a better user experience.
-Shamit