[olug] U.K. Urged to hold back on open source

[David Walker]

I partially agree.  I think governments should be able to use GPL software if 
that is the best solution for their problem.  But I think that government 
produced products should be in a BSD style license so that everyone can 
benefit.

The government is a great place for open source software.  There is so much 
money that is flushed by sending it to the software companies.  No reason to 
pay for each copy of a program when you could just pay for it to be written.


On Thursday 19 June 2003 03:55 pm, William E. Kempf wrote:
> http://msn.com.com/2100-1104_2-1019064.html?part=msn&subj=cdf&tag=mymsn
>
> Probably not a popular opinion on this list, but I agree that the GPL
> should be avoided by governments (or corporations, for that matter).  I
> participate in several "open source" endeavors, but very much dislike the
> GPL.  Just another opinion in the long standing debate of "BSD vs. GPL"
> licensing (though I'm not promoting the BSD license itself, only licenses
> that similarly don't force derivatives to be open source).
>
> What I find interesting in this article is that IBM backs Intellect, who
> made this statement, despite IBM also backing Linux.