>It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
Obviously GPL 'poisons' the market for derivative _proprietary_ tools. The whole idea behind GPL is that the end user should have the right to get the source code. If the only way to charge for your work is through artifical scarcity by hiding the source code then no, you can't do that as a derivative of someone else's GPL licenced code.
If we are talking about your own code, then obviously you can licence it both as GPL and offer it through other agreements aswell. Take x264 for instance, the devs are making good money by offering it through a proprietary licence for those who doesn't want to open their source while making it freely available for open source projects under GPL.
And your copy protection analogy is hypocritical. GPL actually prevents the artificial scarcity employed by copy protection, contrary to the market example you described where someone won't create a GCC plugin because they can't keep it proprietary and thus employ artificial scarcity.
There's no point in arguing against GPL not working with proprietary code given that GPL was created to prevent working with proprietary code. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to make money with GPL licenced code, only that you can't do that through A) limiting the number of copies the recipient can make of the software, B) denying the recipient the source code should he/she request it.
Obviously this prevents the most traditional way of making money from software which is through artificial scarcity (except the case of when it's truly _your_ code, then you can offer other agreements apart from GPL as in the case with x264), however other ways of making money off open source has emerged like that of Red Hat.
edit: I do agree though that disallowing plugins is ultimately not the way to go since there's alot of possibilities that they offer (and no, I'm not talking about proprietary plugins of which I couldn't care less) and I'm glad that GCC now has a plugin-architecture.
Comments
>It is an unfortunate byproduct of GPL like licenses that they poison[1] the market for those specialized tools.
Obviously GPL 'poisons' the market for derivative _proprietary_ tools. The whole idea behind GPL is that the end user should have the right to get the source code. If the only way to charge for your work is through artifical scarcity by hiding the source code then no, you can't do that as a derivative of someone else's GPL licenced code.
If we are talking about your own code, then obviously you can licence it both as GPL and offer it through other agreements aswell. Take x264 for instance, the devs are making good money by offering it through a proprietary licence for those who doesn't want to open their source while making it freely available for open source projects under GPL.
And your copy protection analogy is hypocritical. GPL actually prevents the artificial scarcity employed by copy protection, contrary to the market example you described where someone won't create a GCC plugin because they can't keep it proprietary and thus employ artificial scarcity.
There's no point in arguing against GPL not working with proprietary code given that GPL was created to prevent working with proprietary code. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to make money with GPL licenced code, only that you can't do that through A) limiting the number of copies the recipient can make of the software, B) denying the recipient the source code should he/she request it.
Obviously this prevents the most traditional way of making money from software which is through artificial scarcity (except the case of when it's truly _your_ code, then you can offer other agreements apart from GPL as in the case with x264), however other ways of making money off open source has emerged like that of Red Hat.
edit: I do agree though that disallowing plugins is ultimately not the way to go since there's alot of possibilities that they offer (and no, I'm not talking about proprietary plugins of which I couldn't care less) and I'm glad that GCC now has a plugin-architecture.