Free?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Steve Teale" <steve.teale at britseyeview.com> wrote in message 
news:j7v048$1ut1$1 at digitalmars.com...
> I'd never seen it before - maybe I lead a sheltered life.
>
> GPL: "Free as in Herpes"
>
> Doesn't that just hit the nail on the head.
>

Hah! Classic :)

Even ignoring the viral nature, the "hundred page wall of legalese" alone is 
enough to make me very, very nervous about going anywhere near it (same goes 
for creative commons). Not to mention the thousand different versions of 
[L]GPL.

But I find those issues extremely frustrating, because there's two things I 
do like about GPL:

- From what I've heard, it bans usage in the creation of closed/proprietary 
platforms and devices. (I've come to have a enormous seething hatred for 
such things. Absolutely fed up with them.) I'm sure I could make a 
derivative of zlib/libpng/etc. that adds such a prohibition clause, but that 
would kick it out of the "OSI-approved" category, and would probably create 
a bit of a PR problem. (Plus I imagine I'd probably need to hire a lawyer to 
make sure it would actually work as intended.)

- Dual-licensing software under both GPL and paid-proprietary is feasable. 
I've never been able to think of a way to do the same with something more 
free like zlib/libpng/BSD/MIT/etc, and I think about that a lot. The only 
ways to get paid with those seems to be donations (would that ever even earn 
enough for a pizza? and are there any realistic options besides FraudPal 
*cough* I mean PayPal?) and paid support (which isn't always particularly 
applicable to every program; not everythng really needs much support).