But you bring up a good point. The BSD license is also a free license that people may consider if they're concerned about how customers will accept the "risk" of copylefted software. I could have mentioned that above, even though I'm in the GPL camp. :-)

(It's been several years since I used VB as the main part of my job. I've continued to use it to create a few utilities at work and many programs at home, but I'm finally letting it go. It was pretty nice for whipping up GUI programs in Windows, but even aside from the forced change, now I want freedom.)

As far as development tools and languages are concerned, you should take a look at tcl/tk, a mature and very powerful language with many extension packages available, many under BSD licensing, as is the core product.

I also developed software using VB5 and VB6 and abandoned those products a few years after Microsoft moved to the .NET model. I now work mainly under Linux, but fortunately there are many open source development tools which are designed to be multi-platform. This gives the developer freedom to work on Windows, Linux, etc. as they wish and also not to be dependant on the whims of a company which keeps their development tools as proprietory.

Rob.

You're right -- I made an assumption in my post about those downstream recipients of free software: they must play by the same rules, and share alike (but only if they redistribute, of course). I realize this is a concern for some people.

It's interesting that this came up today in a presentation I attended given by Red Hat. The presenter was asked what Red Hat's position was on the risk to their customers of "viral contamination." The speaker seemed a little nonplussed by this. If people want to avoid comingling their proprietary code with other code, then they must keep them separate. If they want to enjoy the benefits of free and open source software (e.g. creating new code from it), then they are obligated to play by the rules.

I think these obligations are less troublesome than the ones imposed by proprietary licenses, but then I believe in the superiority of the free and open source development model.

I know that Microsoft has provided vb.net as the successor to VB6, but in many ways it is a new language and the migration is quite painful for companies that invested significant amounts in their classic VB applications. I've heard some things about .NET are supposed to be standardized, but is there a long enough spoon to dine with this devil? Why should we trust anything they offer?

There is a lot more liability incurred using some free software licenses (such as the GPL) than what you say. For example, you are required to not only preserve the freedom of the software you use, but also any software you write that is derived from that software, even if you use only a tiny fraction of free software in your otherwise almost entirely original code.

You have to consider this when you deal with your customers. Maybe you've built a library of code you rely on, but if that code was originally derived in any way from any GPL'd software, then your customer may inherit that liability from you, and that may not be something they want.

The other thing is that you highlight VB6 as an example of being locked in with proprietary code, but you don't seem to recognize that Microsoft actually moved VB to an international standards based platform (though the language itself has not been standardized, the underlying bytecode is, and there are already open source implementations of VB.NET that target standard CLI).