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I, being the neighborhood "corporate tool," admire the ingenuity of Crossloop's developers in legally getting around the GPL. I feel like posting a paragraph or so on my guess as to WHY the company got around the GPL in the first place, simply because it has not been said.


As you said, companies could easily "help tomorrow's innovators today." Alas, from a business standpoint, that rarely works out well for the company providing the "help" with innovation. If you catalyze innovation, you bring it about earlier. This means that a better product will come around sooner. Better products are only welcome if you made them. The only time that it will work well for the helping company is if either, 1) the company actually innovated upon their own product, or 2) the company bought license to the new, improved product and/or hired the person who improved it. I said previous that helping innovate rarely works out well for the helping company. That is because both cases 1 and 2 will happen almost exclusively with large companies with good business models (Google comes to mind). Google has enough good programmers that they can sit around making their own shit better, and they do. They're pro enough that they churn our new stuff too.

Essentially, in order for a company to make the most money, it needs to have as close to a monopoly as possible. This is achieved by limiting others' access to the market share. How is this done? Either reduce access to tools that help others get a better product or simply reduce the pool of innovators. For the software industry, a step towards the first of those tactics is closed-source - if a potential competitor doesn't know the code of what he's competing against, he has to start from closer to scratch. The second is done simply by hiring the competition (or as some might suggest, killing them...).

That is one of the problems with open-source as a principle. There isn't enough incentive for a majority of IT business to go open-source. It requires either a large company (which by definition, no start-up is going to be) or a good business model. A sizable chunk of small businesses fail within the first 5 years - they have more to worry about than open-source vs. closed source.


Dear God. I just wrote over a page if it were double-spaced. I now wish you had a preview button on your website (*nudge nudge wink wink* know what I mean?). Side notes:

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[*]I didn't list some statistics exactly because I'm lazy but feel free to check them yourself. (ask Craig if you want to know how much I hate my Research Topics course this semester...)
[*]I forgot what else I wanted to post here, now I just want to use this to see if I'm using BBCode correctly
[*]One more reason you need a preview button - for those of us that haven't memorized BBCode as well as we've memorized HTML (or those who aren't proficient at either)
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