The Iron Yuppie

More on Google and Open Source

To quote Theo de Raadt...

"But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia."

People who defend Google by saying "the community their our search engine" have, as Mr. Obasanjo pointed out, really missed the boat. One could say that Hotmail contributes to the open source community even MORE since people in the open source community use it, but it does not even use their code! The GPL is just weird, plain and simple. It is really hard, in these IP sensitive times, to give something to someone and then ask to control how they use it. Google does not give anything back, at least not yet. When they post a kernel mod, or a server monitoring app they wrote, or whatever, then we can have a new conversation. But the chance of them posting enough back to the community to equal the amount that they have taken is vanishingly small. All the more reason to move to a BSD license. Either make it free (from all restrictions) or restrict it. None of this in between crap.