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by Vincent Foley.
Original Post: Insightful comment about the GPL
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There's a story on Slashdot about how ESR thinks that Linux would be better off without the GPL. Of course, the usual posts about the "virality" of the GPL came up. Some guys asked:
What if I write a program that uses gtk+ and decide to sell it to a corporation or my employer?
And some guy answered this:
That's fine, gtk+ is LGPL so you can do that ... much like libc.
Maybe you were thinking, "what if I take source for random app. X that's GPL'd ... and want to sell the improvments". At which point I'd retort with "what if I want to take the source for internet explorer and sell the improvments" ... same difference, the person who wrote the code gets to decide ... if you don't like it don't use it.
The usual "Oh noes! I can't copy this code in my application, because otherwise I have to make my app GPL! This sucks" comments are very common, but it's true you don't see the "Oh noes! Internet Explorer is closed source, I can't use that in my application! This sucks!" comments nearly as much.
Author's choice, deal with it. If it's GPL and it makes you cry because you have to release the source code of your application if you use a part of it, well don't use the GPL code and write your own code.
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