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Alright, here's my shtick... It's a great race between two open source software ecosystems: copyLEFT and copyFREE.

The copyFREE side is a more amicable pacifist bunch, with more freedoms and more choices, and it has been gaining ground in the last decade in all software categories but one - the kernels. The copyLEFT side was founded by a bunch of militant hippies trying to destroy capitalism, and it had several years' head start, so its viral licenses were grandfathered into some of the most important pieces of open source software. The OS projects within each team like to share code, and the copyLEFT team can also mooch copyFREE code as well, but not the other way around...

This race is contested on many fronts, and one obscure comparison (that I just came up with) is: while running the race forward, to still maintain support for the 80386 platform. Only UNIX systems (sorry, sorry, sorry) that can run on a 80386 PC (sorry, sorry) with actively maintained current versions (sorry) are to be included. Let's see how the two teams compare:

THE COPYLEFT TEAM:

(1) Linux - now i486, as mentioned in this article.

THE COPYFREE TEAM:

(1) FreeBSD - i486 since 2005.

(2) OpenBSD - i486 since 2007.

(3) NetBSD - i486, "80386 support removed" in 2007.

(4) MINIX 3 - i586, 32mb RAM, 635mb HD.

So it looks like the copyLEFT camp had this little "current UNIX on 80386" advantage, and now lost it...

--libman

If there are only BSD like licenses, what is the incentive of any corporation to give back?

See my other post here for many examples of companies contributing to copyFREE projects, and a summary of the market forces that encourage it.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" [Asimov], and it has dangerous side-effects. Copyright/left is not a legitimate Property Right over a scarce economic good, but a contrived monopoly granted by the state and defended through the initiation of force - a physical response to an intellectual act. Copyright has existed for a long time, and could be successfully combated through various means, but the advent of copyleft has constituted a new expansion of government powers - which, in all historical likelihood, will be hijacked and used in contradiction of their original intent. CopyFREE software / content could have been well on their way to making copyright look like a ridiculous anachronism - until copyLEFT arrived to cover copyright's butt!

The thinking will be "look here's this awesome tool that we can take, modify and use for ourselves. Let's do that" and giving back won't even be a part of the thought.

That's why it's called FREE software. GPL, on the other hand, isn't free - it is a worm on a hook.

Energy behind the free version will wane and Open source will disappear. [...]

Except that copyFREE projects are growing faster than copyLEFT ones!

You could argue that some that work on BSD software DO give back, but I think the presence of the GPL has helped the culture form and I'm just not sure that without it's presence that the pattern would continue to long.

Objective evidence demonstrates that copyLEFT does more harm than good.

As explained in the aforelinked post, copyFREE and proprietary software exist in a symbiotic mutually-beneficial relationship, while copyLEFT is just a communist bully looking to destroy the private sector and then take credit for the sun rising every morning!

I could be wrong, and maybe I am, but I am glad for the GPL and fear the rise of BSD. Perhaps it's best to have both and allow them to co exist, but BSD only I'm afraid will slowly lead to only proprietary software. If someone could help me see the other side, I would certainly listen.

Proponents of copyLEFT don't seem to understand the concept of copying - it doesn't make the original disappear! Proprietary software can utilize copyFREE software, but (assuming consumer self-interest) it cannot make a penny without adding value on top of what they've copied. They are not stealing - they're innovating! If they want to keep their code to themselves for a while, that is their right. Sooner or later, competition drives the price of any standing set of features down to zero, and it becomes more profitable for the developer to release the code in order to attract more egoboo / patches / links / attention / potential job offers / etc. The balance between competition for individual benefit and mutually-beneficial cooperation is essential even in microbiology, and it's a great shame that so many people fail to properly understand its role in the marketplace today.

Shakespeare didn't invent most of the words he used, and even many of his plots were unoriginal - but he put the pieces together and created something great. Writers who were influenced by Shakespeare (which is pretty much everybody, directly or indirectly) were less original still. A programmer puts together snippets of code, many of which are not unique in human history. If those snippets are poisoned by a restrictive license, then this programmer's freedom is limited. This isn't much of a problem with proprietary software

First of all, the argument against GPL is primarily a moral argument. GPL is a product of socialist thinking that completely misunderstands how the FLOSS marketplace works, and tries to use "intellectual property" laws (thereby legitimizing them) to hurt "evil corporations". GPL is a gun, and one that is becoming more and more dangerous with every version. It is hypocrisy to call restrictively-licensed software "free".

Secondly, you are wrong on the pragmatic side as well.

Read a bit of UNIX history, will ya? BSD was entangled in legal FUD at just the very time when Linux was taking off (1991 to mid-1994). By the time BSD became BSD-licensed, Linux was the buzzword of the year. This avalanche of attention was great enough to allow it to overcome its licensing handicap.

If your premise was correct, then we'd be seeing a trend of other permissively licensed (copyfree) projects being leapfrogged by restrictively licensed (copyleft) ones, but in reality it's the other way around. The smartest new projects tend to use permissive licenses instead!

The Apache license hasn't stopped Apache httpd from dominating all potential GPLed alternatives over the years, and now it has been supplanted by the even more permissively-licensed Nginx. We've seen popular scripting languages go from copyleft (Lisp, Perl, SpiderMonkey) to almost-copyfree (PHP, Python) to fully-copyfree (V8 / Node.JS, relicensed Ruby, Lua, Go, alternative PHP and Python implementations, etc). Mozilla has been leapfrogged by Chrome. MySQL is slowly beginning to lose market share to PostgreSQL, SQLite, and the various copyfree NoSQL alternatives.

GPL still dominates only among the software projects that were "grandfathered in" in the 1990s, when most people uncritically accepted GPL as "THE open source license". This includes the Linux kernel, mplayer, the popular widget toolkits, and things based on top of them. (The BSD people were geekier than the Linux people, and thus didn't rush to create things like GTK+.) The popularization of HTML5 with copyfree media codecs (and eventually HTML6+, with NaCl, etc) will help the copyfree world leapfrog in the latter two categories.

--libman

"The earlier study looked at a much broader base of projects, not just cherry-picking by limiting itself to packages in a distro."

Good point. The update in the On the continuing decline of the GPL article also mentions this: "UPDATE – It is has been rightfully noted that this decline relates to the proportion of all open source software, while the number of projects using the GPL family has increased in real terms. Using Black Duck’s figures we can calculate that in fact the number of projects using the GPL family of licenses grew 15% between June 2009 and December 2011, from 105,822 to 121,928. However, in the same time period the total number of open source projects grew 31% in real terms, while the number of projects using permissive licenses grew 117%. – UPDATE"

It's more like a total crock of shit.

It's the old percentages game people. When GPL came out there was bugger all open source software and as GPL become more popular closed source proprietary software companies started launching various kinds of open source public relations licences.

Low and behold there are now a whole bunch of other types of open source licences and with proprietary closed source software companies companies playing silly buggers with public relations, breaking down programmes into modules and open sourcing the modules to ramp up the numbers, just so they can crap on about how good they are at sharing.

Just another lame arsed pathetic attack piece. Of course when you want to charge thousands of dollars for a report https://store.the451group.com/index.php?cPath=3&osCsid=gttqeg90f1go39789fobdf4nf2, you have to be pretty inflammatory to pull the mugs in.

From the article, it isn't clear to me what criteria they used to include projects in their survey. It would be interesting to know the numbers based on impact of the project -- a zillion little drivers released under BSD could skew the results.

In fact, the data from Black Duck is "proprietary."
The blogger also did his own version of data collection about 6 months ago and came up with similar results as the "proprietary" data of the time.
However, it was very indiscriminate. He just looked at the license tags on all of the projects on the Rubyforge, Freshmeat, ObjectWeb and the FSF websites.

That's okay... Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Twitter will be thrilled to have you pre-screening their applicants to weed out those who refuse to break tradition in the search for improvement.

Don't Facebook and Twitter continue using MySQL for their core software still while using NoSQL for specialized circumstances?

If that is the case, I suspect these companies already have the talent they need for their very specialized niches. I don't think they have that many jobs in that area as what I consider, implied by your post. Due to NoSQL not being fairly common like SQL is currently in both large and small operations.

I'm unconvinced that opting for NoSQL all the way would be the right decision for acquiring a job in general. Just looking at monster.co.uk, I only found 18 results for NoSQL with not so common programming languages either while 'SQL' returned 2767 results, many of which included far more common programming languages.

If anything, I would honestly recommend people learn both the strengths and weaknesses of both systems and knowing where implementations of either side work best for.

To reassert my point, I am really not convinced that NoSQL is a magical job bringer.

They got hardware which is what they've wanted for a long time. Sun has a wide range of great hardware and a very solid OS.

While Oracle got an OS, Solaris, Solaris like many other unices is losing marketshare to Linux, which may be why Oracle used Red Hat Linux as a basis for it's own distro.

Falcon

Note that WebM is, however, FSF-approved Free Software.

The FSF is rather more active than the OSI, and is unlikely to, e.g., get its corporate registration suspended just because they were too arse-disabled to get their paperwork in.

We do need some sort of organisation like the OSI, perhaps even the OSI itself. But I'm entirely unsurprised someone would consider the present OSI just not to have its shit together enough to be taken seriously.

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/10/06/the-open-source-initiatives-corporate-status-is-suspended-a-caos-theory-qa/

I encourage anyone who mistakes Monty for a friend of Open Source to do a little reading...

The case against the case against Oracle-MySQL

MySQL and a tale of two biases

Monty Program AB's Suggestion to EU Commission to Get Rid of the GPL on MySQL

How Many Times Can Monty Sell MySQL?

The described model is used on some open source projects like Hyperic, Zenoss, Groundwork, Mindtouch and more coming.

The 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service is an analytical service designed to help enterprise end users, software vendors and investors track and understand the opportunities and threats presented by open source.