Picking a license

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message
<e5a031a3-d097-4a63-b87a-7ddfb9e90762 at n15g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>, Patrick 
Maupin wrote:

> After all, lots of software ideas proved their worth in proprietary
> systems, and then were later cloned by FOSS developers.

And vice versa. Everybody, whether working in closed or open environments, 
builds on the work of everybody else. Rsync pioneered the idea of doing 
transfers of incremental changes to a large file across a network without 
being able to have the two versions of the file on the same machine to do a 
direct side-by-side comparison; Microsoft copied the idea in more recent 
versions of its server software. Andrew Tridgell could easily have patented 
his idea, but he chose not to.

Apple pioneered the idea of using 3D graphics hardware to do window 
compositing on the desktop; the Compiz folks went on to figure out how to do 
this efficiently. Microsoft also copied the idea, but forgot the 
“efficiently” part.

Free Software also benefits from networking effects that are not available 
to proprietary developers. The resources available to proprietary developers 
are proportional to the size of the company they work for; typically they do 
not share software with competitors. Whereas the Free Software community is 
like one huge company in this regard, available to freely pass ideas and 
code back and forth. This has led to the creation of ideas that proprietary 
companies simply cannot match.