I'm still trying to get my head around the Free Software concept. If I
buy a Ford and it uses GPL'd code in it's engine controller, Ford is
required to publish the source code to it's engine controller. I'm
guessing that Ford would rather not have the GM and Chevy engineers
poring over their code so they would buy a license to the otherwise
GPL'd code. No problem.

Something like CDDL allows commercial developers to keep one foot in
the Open Source camp since only selected files are copylefted. If you
change them, you have to publish the source code to your changes. Not
unreasonable. If you write some words (in your own file) that link to
words from a CDDL-licensed file, you don't have to publish your code
because it can stay under whatever license you want.

Between GPL and CDDL, which license would better serve the Open Source
Forth community? GPL seems too strong and CDDL too weak.

Brad

On Jan 28, 8:20 am, Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

On Jan 28, 11:20 am, Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

In article <6d26f0f4-9ddd-4449-861f-264945aaec17@h11g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

I promote the commercial ;-) use of ciforth by granting extra rights
to otherwise GPL-ed software. You will find it in de pdf documentation
of lina e.a.
Because one can relate very specifically to Forth, this is much
easier than interpret how a certain license would work out
legally with respect to Forth.

Groetjes Albert

--

On Jan 28, 8:20 am, Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

Is any of this enforcible? If it is free and open-source why would I want to
pay any attention to "requirements" that I make the code available?

-- Charlie Springer

Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> writes:

Maybe, maybe not. It seems that lots of companies have found it
profitable to use GPLed code (e.g., a Linux kernel) in their embedded
products. However, instead of second-guessing Ford's engineers, you
should rather think of what your goals are and which license helps you
to achieve it.

Depends on what goals you want to achieve. The FSF wants to give the
crucial freedoms to as many users as possible ("Open Source" may have
other goals). Their strategy is to use the GPL for libraries that
have no competition or for which the competition is weak. That gives
a competetive advantage to developers of free software over developers
of proprietary software.

On Jan 28, 10:45 pm, Charlie Springer regnirps.com> wrote:

This is a popular approach. The odds of getting busted are slim, so
many companies take their chances. If they get caught, they pay a
settlement and move on. Sarbanes-Oxley ups the ante by providing
federal penalties, however. There's always a chance that in the
future, IP trolls will find this fertile feeding ground and data
mining software will be able to detect GPL components in commercial
software.

Just because someone allows a technology to flourish for years doesn't
mean they wont start their asserting rights a few years down the road.
Nobody heard a peep out of Fraunhofer as the MP3 format proliferated
on the Internet. Then came the "Oh, by the way" notices from the
lawyers.

BTW, if you keep the code in-house and don't distribute it, GPL
doesn't require you to to release the source code.

Brad

On Jan 29, 2:56 am, an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
wrote:

I'm still working to overcome 30 years of psychological conditioning
in consumerism, but this makes sense. If a company uses open source,
they could help their competitors gain market share that they wouldn't
otherwise have. OTOH, an increasing market size offsets mitigates this
disadvantage.

Brad

On Jan 28, 9:20 am, Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

However, the VHDL/Verilog component of an embedded system isn't
covered by GPL. GPL links to it, not the other way around. So special
sauce can always be encapsulated in hardware.

Brad