If you are interested in what is said here, you might also like to read about my proposed OSPRAE project that makes a similar case.
As I write this, the discussion is ongoing. When it moves to an archived position I will try to provide links to it that won't break when this discussion is moved off the front page.
Also, there are corrections in this that were not in the original.
Craig, I appreciate the clarity with which you have stated the problem. I agree that the issues are multifaceted and that there is room for reasonable people to disagree. It occurs to me that we are wasting our time and resources fighting each other on this. I think we should bury the hatchet and throw down the gauntlet at the same time. Suppose that we both agree to fight for the position that _any_ government funded research should be put into the public domain. Then, closed-source shops and GPL shops can pick up from there, and let the best model of development win. Why argue about it when we can settle it by good old fashioned American competition? As long as everything that taxpayers fund gets put into the public domain (which makes sense in the first place--the taxpayers are the public, they paid for it, right?), then the GPLers can add value (and, naturally, their value-add would be under the liberty-guaranteeing provisions of the GPL) in their way, and closed-source companies can add value in their way (and of course their additions will remain proprietary). And the best part is, _all_ of us get the same deal. So, for example, the Mosaic source code would have been public domain, and the free software community would have had a chance to do their thing with it, and you would not have had to pay Spyglass for it (again), since all of us had already paid for the research once. Not only that, but the BSDers would probably have started a project on it, too, and closed-source shops could continue benefitting from their free research. It would be a huge benefit to the GPL types and the BSD types if they could get their hands on all the taxpayer-funded code. The public domain is business-model agnostic--every ideology would have equal access. Note that this is not the case right now. I worked in government-funded stuff for several years, and I saw project after project that sucked up taxpayer money, then failed somewhere on the way to market or got locked behind some university's intellectual property agreement. It would be better for _all_ of us if that stuff was out there, and we just all agreed to let the best business model win. Since the taxpayers represent both people that would like to attempt to commercialize via closed source, and people that would like to build together via GPL, and those that would like to keep things essentially restriction-free via something BSD-like, it makes a lot of sense to say "ok, the government paid for this, here it is, do with it what you will." What could be more fair? Whether GPLers like it or not, there are probably some technologies that will do best if developed further by closed-source companies. Whether closed-source companies like it or not, there are some things that are going to do better under the GPL. Since we have no way of knowing which are which, why don't we just all agree to fight for one thing? If the public funded it, it goes into the public domain.