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Wednesday, November 5. 2008Can you effectively enforce reciprocity?Trackbacks
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Don't forget the fourth type of open source consumers: Those who have no intention to give back, and don't, but do so legally, because they don't distribute anything to the general public.
Very true. But this is the type of consumer Cilk seeks to exclude: their license says if you use your derivative product internally, you still have to give back. The GPL allows this, the CAPL does not.
Clarification: 'this' in the last sentence of that last comment refers to using internally and creating derivatives without giving back.
Every company I've ever worked for, in 25 years in Silicon Valley, has been in the "fourth category" of people who won't pay unless required to, but will pay if those are the rules. Maybe my sample's skewed, but at the least it serves to establish that there is a "fourth category." These companies don't view license compliance as a moral responsibility (to respect or ignore, depending on personal choice), but more in the lines of "the rules of the game." In American football, you can touch the ball with your hands; in world futbol, you can't. Neither side is cheating to comply with the rules, they're just following the rules of that particular game. It would be silly for an American quarterback to refuse to touch the ball simply because some other game forbids it. It would, in fact, be crazy!
Cilk's bet, then, is not that everyone is category-4, but only that there are enough category-4 people to make a significant financial difference for them. They'll see if they're right as time goes on. I'm not sure which outcome I expect, but it's certainly an interesting bit of research! |
self.about()My name is Joshua Kugler, and I'm a programmer/developer and a system admin. On this here blog, I pontificate about all things related to code, work, projects, and sometimes just life. Look around, snag my RSS feed, and drop me a line, if you wish. All opinions are mine, and not necessarily those of my employer.
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