On 14 Feb 2002, at 16:12, David K. Trudgett wrote:

>
> >
> > The GPL is a restrictive license.
>
> The GPL is a free license, designed to promote freedom. Not everyone
> wants freedom, of course, such as people trying to sell their
> applications according to the normal commercial model. That's fine.
> These people shouldn't use the GPL. Nor should they expect a free ride
> by incorporating GPL'd software into their binaries. Share and share
> alike is what it's about. As for it being "viral", that's a load of
> poppycock. Use the public API of GPL'd software and don't link it into
> your executables (statically or dynamically) and you're quite safe.
>

The GPL is the most restrictive licence around, you are effectively
limited to producing "free" software with it, because anybody else
can re-distribute that software for free, your hopes of actually
making money, are slim to none. In some cases you don't have a
choice, if the library you want to use is GPL then you can't make
money off your work, and that isn't always a good thing. This is
why there are so many variants of the GPL like the MPL, IPL, etc.

The problem with MySQLs commercial licence, is that it's too
expensive for a lot of stuff that MySQL would be good for.

What it really comes down to, is we need to ask the question, who
is the typical Interbase commercial customer, and who is the
typical Firebird customer (forget the IB/OE, it's a non-starter)?
Then determine what are the alternate choices for those
customers, and how do we get them to use IB or FB.

Paul











Paul Schmidt
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com