From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1025b4,74b2c28810483a9c,start X-Google-Attributes: gid1025b4,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,88b676af04f3073d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: fjh@cs.mu.oz.au (Fergus Henderson) Subject: future of proprietry source code (was: Ada generics are bad) Date: 1998/04/13 Message-ID: <6gthdp$bje$1@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 343872405 References: <6gm6jc$fbp@newshub.atmnet.net> <6gs5qa$s46@newshub.atmnet.net> <6gt05f$rt8@drn.newsguy.com> Organization: Computer Science, The University of Melbourne Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,gnu.misc.discuss Date: 1998-04-13T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: nabbasi@earthlink.net writes: >But lets be realistic here. as long as there are companies who work for >profit, there will always be companies who will guard the source code they >develop. to remove this protection, you have to remove the need for companies >to make profit out of software. No, all you need to do is to make it uneconomic to hoard source code. Today, in many (most?) areas of the software industry it is already uneconomic to write products from scratch, without reusing existing software such as GUI libraries, for example. Furthermore, this trend towards dependence on code reuse looks set to increase even further as times goes by. Currently these libraries are mostly proprietry, but imagine what would happen if they were GPL'd! Given the amazing rate of progress of GPL'd software since the birth of the internet, it is far from unimaginable that in the future GPL'd libraries may outpace and outcompete all the proprietry libraries. This could lead to a situation in which refusal to release source code would incur such a competitive disadvantage, due to the resulting inability to reuse all this GPL'd code, that it was utterly uneconomic. I don't know whether or not this scenario will eventuate, but it is not unrealistic, IMHO, given a sufficiently long time frame. If this scenario _does_ eventuate, however, then I think it could lead to a much more efficient use of resources than is currently the case in the software industry. -- Fergus Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit WWW: | of excellence is a lethal habit" PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.