Blue Sky On Mars

Thank god, it is in PUBLIC DOMAIN licence or else it would be a slap in the face for those companies/people who paid HIGH TAXES (50% bracket) only to see their funded public research works becomes to GPL (any work (papers or software) written while at work in public funded institute/researchs should be PUBLIC DOMAIN, else do it in your own spare time! & host it on another server paid with your own $$$). Anyone
under public fundings who feels compel to slap licenses like COMMERCIAL, GPL or LGPL, should be brought to attention).

Because the public (US people) paid tax dollars for it, anyone living in US can do anything with it including giving it to its next door neighbour/overseas friends/families like canadians as he/she see fits so long the software do not threaten national security like crytography. Hey, technically, he/she (avg american) paid for it no matter how little their contributed tax amount, it belongs to them in every rights. So if an american peoples, companies can give their best overseas friends,families,companies a copy of it, then it only make sense it is public domain to everyone including overseas peoples. Since everyone seems to have a friend, family in US that can send you a copy.

Similar with GPL apps, you paid the first copy (for transferal fees) & you can give it to the rest of the world.

I agree that development like ImageJ should be public domain. I also think that any software developed by private firms for the government should also be public domain (excepting national security-related development).

A stickier point comes along when you consider the government *starting with* a GPLed piece of software. This would compel them to release their changes under the GPL. However, that is arguably better than starting with commercial software.

The govt. should never start any project from a viral license like GPL because commercial companies paid high 50% taxes brackets from their high revenues, ultimately they paid the most for it. Companies should force govt. to close any GPL/LGPL projects as this is the perfect example of “biting the hands that feed you”. It would be an insult to them if they found out that their funded govt. project cannot be used in their commercial project. Not to say it belongs solely to companies, but the massive population of the average joes at lower tax brackets & lower wages also makes up a good substantial portion. To ordinary folks, GPL, BSD or free binaries would not even matter. To commercial companies, GPL hurts & insults them. Companies cannot further enhanced the libraries (GPL or LGPL) without surrendering the source to its closest competitors which is unfair considering these companies can spent just as much resources to adapt, enhance, maintain, polish as it took to create the library (eg. may hire expensive assemblers sitting their 9 to 5 just for tedious manual tweaking at assembly level & hire many programmer analyst to sweep for bugs (it may even take more time to find bugs than to simply rewrite it - mozilla is an example of total rewrite instead of fixing the horrible 4.7x series - whoever the leader is, he/she must have decide it is more productive to do so as they must do some form of cost analysis)). Why must companies surrender it?

Commercial libraries can be carefully selected for sensible flat fee, sensible restraints & zero royaties. Other free license can like BSD can but just not the viral GPL & LGPL. If you think, not much resource goes into maintaining, enhancing an existing libraries. One only has to look at the amount of effort, microsoft took to bring crash- prone IE3 (mosaic source) to where is it today.

I agree that public domain or a liberal license like BSD is the best way to go for govt development. However, if the government were extending some existing software, I would prefer that they spend money extending GPLed software than commercial software. If they extend commercial software, only *one* company gets the benefit of that development. On the other hand, extending GPLed software benefits everyone who can use the software under those terms.

The LGPL does allow commercial benefit for products that use the library. The browser example is interesting, because Mozilla has done more with the browser than Microsoft and the MPL (based on my last read of it) is fairly similar in idea to the LGPL.

Kevin