As a software author, I have strong opinions about licenses

As a software author, I have strong opinions about licenses

Posted Dec 1, 2006 23:54 UTC (Fri) by shieldsd (subscriber, #20198)
In reply to: As a software author, I have strong opinions about licenses by emk
Parent article: Who is being divisive?

As a a software author (Jikes) and also employee of a company (IBM) that contributes to open-source, I have some opinions too (though they are of course offered here as just my own, and not on behalf of IBM.)

You say you don't want companies to profit from open-source without sharing.

Why should they have to share? All they have to do is to meet the terms of any license under which they receive software.

However, it is only because companies such as IBM, HP, Intel, Fujitsu, Red Hat, and Novell are able to make sufficient profits from open-source that they collectively contribute well over $1B/year to make Linux better.

I've seen estimates that at least half the major Linux kernel contributors are paid to do their work and they account for substantially more than half the accepted contributions.

You are clearly profiting from their contributions. Why can't they profit from yours?

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