On Fri, 3 Oct 2008, Florin Iucha wrote: > In any venture there are risks and payoffs and one has to make all sorts > of choice, based on competing constraints. GPL is just another one of > those choices along with buy, lease, build, license, and others. I agree. The reason I agree is that some companies choose to release code under the GPL. These companies must have "corporate lawyers" approving such choices. One example I know of is the VNC program released under the GPL by the Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab which was owned by Olivetti and Oracle Corporation at the time. This program changed names to RealVNC a few years after AT&T bought the lab and shut it down. RealVNC is still available under GPL as are several variants that have been developed by other people, but there is also a commercial version with enhancements (most importantly, encryption). I started using Xvnc on my Solaris box in about 1997. Great stuff. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealVNC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Research_Laboratory Mike