Reply to post: Re: So what did YOU do then ?

Re: So what did YOU do then ?

"What are you useful for ?"

There are more programmers and systems than you can imagine, from tiny embedded devices right up to industrial systems. The difference is people involved with those don't evangelise with emotional cue words. Certainly, the software produced may not be as open as you might like[1], but one has to ask where the true benefit lies - the availability of code that you can hack at if you feel so inclined (and 99%+ of the population are unlikely to be that interested), or the software that makes your car more efficient and cheaper to run, the software inside an AED that might just save your life, the software that means you can travel on public transport just by waving a card and not fiddling around for money (or worse, find "exact change").

1 - For what it is worth, I consider GPL to be "source available" but I certainly do not consider it truly open in the sense of what we generally mean here. Yes, the bsd licences do not require modified source to be public which is bad from a purists point of view, but on the other hand the GPL mandates that all code is supposed to become GPL which makes it practically impossible for a company to build a "value added" product on top of a GPL base. The company will have difficulty with the proprietary parts, and no they shouldn't necessarily have to share these if the development is their source of income. Some companies will abuse this, yes. But then some companies abuse tax laws, human rights, etc. It happens. It is bad but it happens. Just be careful that GPLv4 doesn't make the cure worse than the disease, because the changes in GPLv3 would imply that it is heading in that direction.