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