>The main reason 8th is not GPL licensed is that I (Ron) have strong philosophical objections to being forced to give away my intellectual property. I disagree with the very tenet that "code should be free" in the GPL sense. Instead, I am of the opinion that you are free to have access to the 8th source code if you are willing to pay for that privilege. If not, not.
>A secondary reason we do not follow the "open source" idea is that, frankly, over the many years we have used open-source projects, we have been struck by the simple fact that a great many of those projects are maintained only to the extent the author decides to do so. Thus for example, the venerable "gcc" compiler has severe bugs which were reported many years ago, but which will probably never be fixed. This, despite the fact that the code for it is available and anyone could fix it at will. Nobody has, probably nobody will -- because the gcc code is extraordinarily difficult to grok. So the "many eyes" argument for open-source and GPL is not overly convincing to me.