[H-GEN] re: OpenSolaris

[Greg Black]

On 2005-02-13, Harry Phillips wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 03:23 +1000, Benjamin Carlyle wrote:
> > 
> > Users should understand their rights and responsibilities when they're
> > given open source software. At the moment it seems too hard to do that.
> 
> As a non-programing *user* I disagree, basically I don't care whether
> the licence is GPL, LGPL, MPL, MPLv2, CDDL, QHYT, ZHYT or even
> RobsLittleLicence. All I need to know is that it is OSI approved and I
> find it useful.

Er, no.  As a user, you need to understand and comply with every
licence that covers all the software that you use.  So, unless
you've got an unhealthy interest in keeping the fine details of
seventy billion different licences in your head, you are indeed
strongly disadvantaged every time some idiot[1] decides to use
yet another licence.

> Maybe one day if I ever become a programmer (I doubt it) I will be
> concerned if I can take this snippet of code and use it in another
> project but as just a user it doesn't bother me that much which licence
> it uses.

Sure, it affects software developers more than ordinary users,
but don't imagine that you're not affected.

Cheers, Greg

[1] It might appear that I'm being inflammatory by describing
    people who develop and use new licences as idiots; I don't
    mean that they are complete idiots (although some of them
    may well be), I'm just saying that this mania for creating
    new licences is the behaviour of idiots[2].

[2] If you (for any value of "you") think I'm directing ad
    hominem remarks at you personally, I'm not.  I'm talking
    about behaviour.