Re: freedom

[Joerg Frochte <joerg dot frochte at uni-essen dot de>]

Hello,

* Gangolf Jobb <jobb at stat dot uni-muenchen dot de> [030402 17:41] schrieb:

[..]
> i wrote "... support commercial use ... ", and not "giving away for 
> free". taking a fee for good software is ok. we have similar laws here 
> in germany, and i am not completely uninformed. however, in most cases 
> the scientific work can be used for free. the problem with the gpl is, 
> that it does not offer the possibility to buy a license. it even 
> prohibits commercial use - in the sense of selling software.

I am form Germany too and it seems that I have a different view 
off this issue. For example mp3 "is form Germany". I is an "academic 
product" and it is not for free, isn't it?

Here comes a list with some free software products produced or support 
by german university's:

http://www.openmesh.org/
http://www.gnu-pascal.de/
http://www-sp.iti.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/software/ppower4/
http://www.bauv.unibw-muenchen.de/makros-a/makrosae.html
...

> why not selling software? 

But you can sell free software. For example you will find in Bavaria next 
to you the linuxland Company (http://www.linuxland.de), which sells e.g. 
Debian. 
They give you support, a nice german handbook and a box, and people are 
buying it. So it works. Of course not everyone buys it, but linuxland 
do also not really produces it. So they do not have the costs that they 
would have, if they would try to really "program debian".

It is the same with you. If you e.g. program a nice gui above gsl, than  
you have done only a little of the work, but you want to sell it your 
way?

If you want some numerical software that is not gpl, than buy it!
You can buy Matlab, ANSIS and so one. You are free to do so ...

> ? everybody shold have the right to get computers for free and should 
> know about every secret inside a processor, even about those nobody is 
> normally interested in.

If Palladium and TCPA comes up, many of us will be very interested in 
"every secret inside a processor".

For your program Treefinder (http://www.treefinder.de/) you did the 
same. You choose a licence
(http://www.treefinder.de/tf-march2003-manual.html#_Toc35684643)
that fits to your needs : "free of charge for scientific purposes".

I fact no one argues with you, that this software is lost for the 
free software community, because of the licence.

At all I do also not like gpl if it is used for library's. 
I do more like a LGPL or a BSD-style Licence, but I would 
never argue with the programmers. It's there work, so 
it is there right to decide, which licence to use. 


Please let us stop this discussion, it won't lead no one anywhere, 
maybe except perhaps to insulted humans. 


Bye,

Joerg