I suppose "abusing" might not be the best word to use, but I've been reading about the differences between the BSD licenses and GPL and I'm curious about something...
Say I came up with [killer app] and I decided I wanted it to be free and chose a BSD license. Now say someone else (maybe even a large tech company) realized it was great, re-branded it, closed the source, marketed it as there own (left the copyright notice in a little "about" screen) and provided a level of support that I could never match.
My ability to participate in the creation of my own software has essentially been taken from me. If my product had been "bigtoque Office", then MS came along and turned it into MS Office, I could still make my own software, but is anyone gonna use it when they could get something from some other well known big company?
Has this ever happened to anyone? I suppose this could happen with GPL software as well (with the exception of closing the source).
I guess I really am thinking about how to protect myself and my software. Is my line of thinking just wrong here? It seems like it doesn't really fit with the idea of FOSS. Should I be thinking that when I create open and free software, that I should just accept that someone will likely take it, improve it, and possibly profit from it in ways that I couldn't?
Say I came up with [killer app] and I decided I wanted it to be free and chose a BSD license. Now say someone else (maybe even a large tech company) realized it was great, re-branded it, closed the source, marketed it as there own (left the copyright notice in a little "about" screen) and provided a level of support that I could never match.
My ability to participate in the creation of my own software has essentially been taken from me. If my product had been "bigtoque Office", then MS came along and turned it into MS Office, I could still make my own software, but is anyone gonna use it when they could get something from some other well known big company?
Has this ever happened to anyone? I suppose this could happen with GPL software as well (with the exception of closing the source).
I guess I really am thinking about how to protect myself and my software. Is my line of thinking just wrong here? It seems like it doesn't really fit with the idea of FOSS. Should I be thinking that when I create open and free software, that I should just accept that someone will likely take it, improve it, and possibly profit from it in ways that I couldn't?