[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: The Future of MissingH

[Benjamin Franksen]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Monday, November 27, 2006, 1:46:34 AM, you wrote:
>> I hate to be nitpicking but GPL is not only compatible with but
>> encourages commerce in general and commercial software in particular. It
>> is incompatible with proprietary software. There's a difference.
> 
> of course, but on practice most of commercial software are
> closed-source. i personally use this license when i want to show code
> to the world but don't want that but will be used in commercial
> software (without paying royalties).

This is impossible. GPL expressly allows commercial use of your software.
You cannot license under GPL and at the same time disallow making money out
of it, this would be incompatible. If, however, you actually meant to
say 'proprietary', then I would kindly ask you to say so. Imprecise usage
of the term 'commercial' as a synonym (**) for 'proprietary' only serves to
promote common misconceptions. It is neither in the spirit nor the words of
the GPL to be opposed to commerce (=earning money by selling work or things
of value to others), and there is ample proof(*) that it isn't opposed to
commerce in practice, too.

And no, I don't intend to pursue this (somewhat off-) topic any further ;-)

Cheers
Ben
(*) anyone know how much Novell paid for buying SuSE? Not that it's gotten
any better since...
(**) some would say 'euphemism'