Re: Fuzzy machine learning framework v1.2

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Tue, 29 May 2012 11:38:02 +0200, Georg Bauhaus  
<rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> a écrit:
> It is stunning to see programmers who are used to formal,
> rational thinking, becoming irrational. ;-) ;-)
>
> The *combination* of someone else's work and yours is not your own
> work!
On the opposite, that's rational and practical. There is an issue with  
proper measure of things here. Think about the extreme case of a single  
line of GPL in a million lines… you see? To summarize, if you just did  
some tiny stuff or some easy bug fix, that's not an issue, but if you did  
more big things during months, better not create the big thing on a GPL  
component and recreate the GPL component if needed (and give up and do  
nothing if the GPL component is too big). There is also an issue with  
linking, even if you clearly keep yours and others separate, you are still  
in trouble, even if you did not derive from another ones work, but added  
something which link to it (via non-LGPL libraries or via object files),  
what you added, is not yours in practice, as you cannot decide what the  
license of your own part is. Or else you have to redistribute only you own  
source part, and require consumers to build all, which is not what  
consumers usually want (there want something ready to use). Better a  
proprietary license which allow you to distribute a ready to use  
application, than such a burden to you and users.

> The resulting work is *not* the sole intellectual property
> of either contributor.
Here is the point. But the story goes as if it was the sole property of  
the initial authors, which decided of everything for all others who  
succeed him.

That said, as already noticed, this does not prevent anyone to simply  
avoid GPL and to rely on their own only (fortunately, Stallman could not  
find a way to force all authors to use the GPL for their original work,  
but still sadly make many consumers think that's the only one legitimate  
license).

But even then, there is still another issue involving culture, I will  
express later in a reply to Simon (this will be a personal opinion again).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University