[lug] GPL/Open Source License Questions

[Peter Hutnick]

Jeffrey Siegal said:
> Peter Hutnick wrote:

>>> Certainly it violates the spirit of the GPL.
>> I disagree.
> Not everyone agrees with the FSFs interpretation

Uh.  By whom was the GPL imbued with a spirit, if not the FSF?

To be clear, are you saying that forking /might/ be linking?  Or that
something less than forking might not be?

>> Dude, one of the most successful businesses in the WORLD was built on
>> /DOS/!
>
> What I wrote had nothing to do with technical merit or business value.
> If there are significantly licensing uncertainties surrounding your
> product, you're going to have a hard time getting customers to rely on
> it, and an even harder time getting investors to back you.  (Yeah, there
>  are exceptions like VC backing Napster and so forth, but they're just
> that.)  This is particuarly the case if you're competing against a
> similar product which avoids that risk.

You may have noticed that I quoted and responded to this part twice.  You
may have noticed the use of the word "dude."  This all happened in a post
script.

Next time I will enclose this sort of thing in <humor class="msbashing">
</humor> tags to make it easier on you ;-)

-Peter