Judgment That Defeats Us

I was just watching Apocalypse Now Redux for like the 100th time and there was this line by Kurtz

Because it's judgment that defeats us.

and it made me think.

How many times in our life have we failed to execute or take a risk because of our judgement. I mean look at Wikipedia. The first time I saw it, I remember thinking how was it ever gonna work. I mean who would ever take the time to write/edit articles for free, especially when the standards set for formatting was simply too high.

If I had dreamt of wikipedia, I'd have dropped it because of my judgement. But the truth of the matter is it worked. So how many ideas and dreams are lost everyday because of judgement?

Boo GPL/GNU

Continuing from my previous post about open-source licenses, it seems the bad guys of the bunch is GPL/GNU. Why? Because if your software uses even one line of GPL/GNU licensed code, you've to re-release your source code under a GPL/GNU license or your can't use your own software at all. How's them apples?

And here I was a great fan of GNU\Debian Linux. In fact, I was right in the middle of tweaking the file system to make read operations faster than write operations (at the expense of the write operation). Now I need to look into another platform. Good thing I found out about it before I made too much headway.

BSD or MIT licenses seem to be the ideal choice. But there's not a whole lot of software released under those. The next best choice, Apache, has quite a few, but they are mostly written in Java. I'm actually quite good at Java, but it doesn't serve my purpose in the long run due to resource and performance requirements. I need good C/C++ software upon which I can build my own software.

Open Source License Comparison

The table below shows a major comparison of the open source license. There are a few more minor difference but I had enough legal reading for one day.

	Apache	GPL	LGPL	BSD	MIT
Disclaimer of liability	x	x	x	x	x
Preserve Copyright Notice	x	x	x	x	x
Can be used in commercialclosed source software	x	-	*	x	x
Can be sublicensed	*	-	-	*	x
Prevents the authors name from being used to promote derived works	x	x	x	x	-

x = yes
- = no
* = under certain circumstances, yes