The next step

[Frank Atanassow]

Simon Marlow wrote (on 28-05-01 10:17 +0100):
> It's not propaganda.  The fact is if any of the standard libraries use
> the LGPL, then some people will be prevented from using them.  That's
> the last thing we want, right?  Now you might argue from a moral
> standpoint that the companies that these people work for are basing
> their business models on intellectual property and therefore deserve
> everything they get, but we're not trying to do open source advocacy
> here, we're just trying to put together a set of libraries that everyone
> can use.

Some people don't see it that way. They would say that the GPL is the _less_
restrictive license because it ensures that everybody benefits (equally) from
everybody else's improvements. From that perspective, companies benefit also
since they may use and improve the code, provided they "publish" it. Will they
lose some potential revenue that way? Possibly. But as you suggested, the idea
is to make the audience as _wide_ as possible, not as _rich_ as possible. ;)

-- 
Frank Atanassow, Information & Computing Sciences, Utrecht University
Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands
Tel +31 (030) 253-3261 Fax +31 (030) 251-379