Re: future of proprietry source code (was: Ada generics are bad)

[tzs@halcyon.com (Tim Smith)]

Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:
>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!

For large categories of software, the majority of customers don't want,
don't need, and could not make effective use of, source code, whereas one's
competitors could make effective use of it.  As long as that remains true,
a company can, all other things being equal, make more money keeping their
source secret.

That difference will probably be enough to ensure that there will be
companies that develop and sell development tools that can be used to make
proprietary software, so I don't think it is likely that it will ever come
to pass that all the major libraries are GPL'ed.

--Tim Smith