Re: GPL

Posted by dscho on
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Thresholding-from-Java-tp3688545p3688555.html

Hi,

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, Robert Dougherty wrote:

> > [explanation about possible reasons to choose GPL]

> It looks like your are saying that your friends want to be sure that
> their work is never economically important to spare themselves the the
> embarrassment of finding out that it is and that they were not clever
> enough to benefit from it.

I probably did a bad job at explaining; English is not my first language.

In no way did I mean to indicate that the people I personally know who
pick the GPL over the BSD license would be embarrassed to know that their
code would be economically exploitable.

The reasons are usually not as simple as that. Personally, some of my
GPL-licensed code is quite likely up-to-par, if not better than,
commercially available code. In some cases, I just decided that I want to
get contributions back instead of money. Or to allow others to improve my
code (and benefit from those improvements myself).

Also, you should always keep in mind that asking nicely for a license
change works more often than you might think. (But of course, that usually
means that when you want to sell something using code of others, you have
to share the profits with them. You might see that as a downside.)

In fact, I can think of five cases regarding ImageJ-related code right now
where a license change was asked for, and in four of them, the authors
agreed happily to said license change.

But let's move on, discussions about licenses are about as exciting as a
rusty drill.

Ciao,
Johannes