[Haskell-cafe] Why Not Haskell?

[Piotr Kalinowski]

On 06/08/06, Brian Hulley <brianh at metamilk.com> wrote:
> Afaict a license such as GPL allows anyone, even a non-programmer, to just
> re-distribute whatever application you created because one condition of it
> is that anyone should be free to share software with anyone else without
> having to pay anything extra to the people who wrote it, and I think this is
> essentially based on the notion that software should not be regarded as an
> ownable or sellable "thing".

Actually, to the best of my knowledge, based on what Stallman said in
his life and reading the GPL license - it is not about software not
being sellable. The whole notion of open source is not in fact to
distribute it freely, because you can charge a fee for transfering
your work and the license does not impose any restrictions on that fee
(except the case of supplying the source code to someone who received
the work in binary form.)

Instead, the idea is that customers should be able to see the source
code and modify it according to their specific needs without paying
additional fees. And they should be able to distribute those changes.

Perhaps you encountered this: it's free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.

Regards,
Piotr Kalinowski

-- 
Intelligence is like a river: the deeper it is, the less noise it makes