[MPlayer-G2-dev] dual licensing try 2

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 12:48:52AM +0100, Gabucino wrote:
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > A deal is good, as long as it involves them releasing their whole
> > program under GPL or at least halting all production permenantly.
> This is why I suggested mplayer-legal..
> 
> 
> > The ones wronged are all the people of the world who are unable to use their
> > sources, whether or not they want to, because of proprietary restrictions.)
> This is the RMS-ish viewpoint which is IMHO bullshit and every time I hear
> it, I get an itch.

Assuming an upper bound on program size, there are a finite number of
programs. Every time someone makes and holds copyright on a new
program, and doesn't make it free, a chunk of this pie is stolen from
what others could potentially create in the future. One out of this
gigantic finite number might seems insignificant, but once you
consider that copyright covers anything similar/derived, and once you
consider the sheer amount of proprietary software being produced, it
IS significant.

If you don't believe me, look at patents. Every useful idea (even
trivial ones) gets scooped up and "owned" by someone, so no one else
can use the same idea even if it comes to them freely. The only reason
this is so blatently obvious with patents is that their scope is so
much broader. Given time, exactly the same thing will happy with
copyright. It's naive to underestimate the anti-creative power of
copyright, and outright counterproductive to mock those who fight it.

BTW, here's another argument against dual-licensing. Suppose you add a
new feature to MPlayer, and this new feature is in the GPL-only part.
Now your greedy licensee comes and says "hey, you didn't write that!
it's part of our closed-source mplayer and someone ported it back to
yours without our permission!" This is very hard to argue against, and
the party with more money wins. Of course the greedy licensee can't
make this argument when the only license is GPL, since they're
required to license any derivative work they make under the GPL.

Rich