<snip>

> OK, I'm writing from the UK, but .. I don't see any reason why public
> funding should be used to support private gain. If you want to make
> private profits, go and do your own research! I would have expected
> Americans to hold such a view even more strongly.

As an American, I don't see any reason why an American company should not
be allowed to use code developed with American public money to make a
profit as long as the rest of the the country (corporations and
individuals) have access to the original code as well. If  American tax
dollars were used to create some program that is very useful, then why
shouldn't an American company be able to profit from it? In theory, they
have as much right to that code as any other American tax payer.

An example of this might be the *BSD code as it was developed at UCB with
the support of public tax dollars, Apple is now using FreeBSD (which is a
direct decendent of UCB-BSD) as the core of their new operating system,
OS X. I, as a tax payer, have no problems with this, AAMOF, this is one
example of why I prefer the BSD license over the GPL.

If a company contracts with a public institution to produce some part of a
software product, that part of the end product should be released under a
BSD style license because that software was developed with the support of
tax dollars. Even if the company "funded" the development effort, the
university is a public institution and the orginization/experience the
company is drawing from is public!

$0.02US

<snip>

--
|     .~~~/"\~~~.
|   / / / |^| \ \ \  Robin Reagan
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"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the
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