Ok, everyone's missing the fundamental point again: [LWN.net]

Ok, everyone's missing the fundamental point again:

Posted Nov 30, 2004 20:46 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)
Parent article: The Lawyers are coming

"For example, businesses that modify Open Source code for internal use may be surprised that seemingly innocuous actions may initiate distribution requirements, which could force them to give away their customized software for free, or at a modest cost, to their competitors."

Ok, and that would ... be? Software which the company in question has based on GPL'd other code which they did not have to invest the money to create?

Everyone who has this argument seems always to miss that fundamental point: you receive value from GPL'd code you use: you don't have to pay to create it.

That is why you're enjoined to treat that code and it's deerivative works in the fashion the license requires: if you don't, you are *stealing* something of demonstrative value. After all, if it *didn't* have that demonstrative value *to you*, you wouldn't use it in the first place, right?

(I make, personally, a kindred argument about movie producers who steal a title and author for a movie that has little or nothing to do with the book (like, oh, "Starship Troopers"?): clearly this is fradulent, because the audience *who liked the book* are your target audience for the movie; if they weren't, you wouldn't have bothered spending the license money, right?)

But, of course, this may all be Just Me.

So many things are Just Me.

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