Picking a license

[Robert Kern]

On 2010-05-08 22:03 , Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Martin P. Hellwig"<martin.hellwig at dcuktec.org>  writes:
>> I fail to see what is morally wrong with it. When I ,as the author,
>> share my work to the public, I should have made peace with the fact
>> that I, for all intends and purposes, lost control over its use.
>
> Does the same thing apply to Microsoft?  If I get a copy of MS Office,
> do you think I should be able to incorporate its code into my own
> products for repackaging and sale any way that I want, without their
> having any say?  If not, why should Microsoft be entitled to do that
> with software that -I- write?

Martin is not saying that you *ought* to release your code under a liberal 
license. He is only saying that he does not believe he is inviting moral hazard 
when *he* decides to release *his* code under a liberal license. He was 
responding to Steven who was claiming otherwise.

> Is there something in the water making
> people think these inequitable things?

Is there something in the water making people think that every statement of 
opinion about how one licenses one's own code is actually an opinion about how 
everyone should license their code?

> If Microsoft's licenses are
> morally respectable then so is the GPL.

Martin is not saying that the GPL is not morally respectable.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco