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Businessweek Recommends License Switch for Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thinking-about-the-big-picture dept.

MadFarmAnimalz writes "BusinessWeek has an article about the perceived threat of patents to linux, citing the SCO case, the opening of OSRM, and the Munich situation as evidence for the veracity of their conclusion that Linux isn't safe. Their solution? Relicense to the BSD license or the Mozilla license. On a positive note, the article's author does link to RMS' article Why Software Should Not Have Owners; good to see Stallman being quoted and linked to in a publication Like BusinessWeek."

24 of 548 comments (clear)

  1. No protection by msgmonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't see how switching licenses will help.

    The licenses mentioned (patent clauses in GPL acknoweldged) deal with copyright and not patents which although people easily confuse are completely different legal areas.

    1. Re:No protection by smootc-m · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Switching to a BSD license will just encourage code forking which is bad. We will just end up in another "Unix Wars" scenario with proprietary versions of GNU/Linux popping up with their own incompatible extensions.

      The real beauty of the GPL is that it encourages collaboration and sharing with the side effect that forking is discouraged. GNU/Linux is becoming the commodity OS precisely because of the GPL.

    2. Re:No protection by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful
      He's a tech reporter who hasn't investigated the situation much and wrote the first thing that occurred to him. He did a pretty big disservice.

      Switching from the GPL to BSD or another license would actually reduce the protection. It doesn't provide any incentive to license the patents for all users. Who do you think is going to develop all of this software if only big companies are able to distribute it legally? We'd be back to proprietary software and proprietary licensing.

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    3. Re:No protection by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Insightful
      If MBA's had been involved in Linux from the beginning, there'd be nothing to discuss.
      There'd be no Linux at all.

      Same old story... Come late to the party, then know all about how it's done.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    4. Re:No protection by eric76 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't see that the GPL does anything at all to prevent code forking.

      Say you wanted a different version of Linux that did something differently. So you make the changes, however much they are and you donate them back to Linux.

      But the Linus doesn't have to accept those changes. Or he can pick and choose which portions he thinks are good.

      But since you donated your modifications back, you are free to use those modifications to release your own version.

      In a manner of speaking, there already is a fork of Linux. Except it's a fork that is built into the current release instead of a completely separate fork. I'm talking, of course, about SELinux from the NSA.

      What switching to the BSD license would really encourage is everyone else, for example, Microsoft, to be free to use the code for their own commercial purposes.

      By switching to the BSD license, Microsoft could release their own closed and proprietary version of Linux. For example, they could use the Linux code to enhance Windows and make it able to run any and all Linux programs available.

    5. Re:No protection by grumbel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The GPL doesn't prevent forking, it just makes sure that code can be merged back and forth between the forks at all times, so that stuff like the WineX vs Wine scenario can never happen with the GPL.

    6. Re:No protection by aquabat · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I think the point the article is trying to make (although not explicitly) is that a BSD style license would allow big software companies to hide their use of open source software in their products.

      Assuming the company is distributing its open source derived software, the GPL requires public disclosure of the original open source software and any derivations, which would give patent holders evidence of infringement.

      The BSD license, however, lets the company distribute their product without acknowledging any open source content. They can keep all their code secret. This places a greater burden on the patent holder to prove that a patent is being infringed at all.

      I think this is the "protection" the article refers to.

      --
      A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
    7. Re:No protection by Ruie · · Score: 5, Insightful
      GPL does help with code forking - it gives you the freedom to do with the fork as you please.

      As opposed to buying forked software (say Mac OS X) and then having to wait for the developer to fix bugs in the portions of code that are binary only.

      In other words, the help is not in prevention of forks, but rather in making it easy to merge them back.

    8. Re:No protection by oolon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The point they miss (because they are looking back) is many corportate donors of software source in linux would never have done it if it was not GPL. As the GPL maintains a level playing field, if a competitor takes the code and uses it they have to give back (or rather forward). If Linux had been BSD all the donations could have just been torn out of linux and used in other things. I believe resulting in the donations not being made in the first place, do you think IBM would have dontated its filesystem if it thought Veritas could just take the good bits of the code?

      James

    9. Re:No protection by schon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I still don't see a problem.

      Then you have blinders on.

      The problem isn't that the original code is free, or isn't free, or that MS's version is or isn't free. The problem is that THERE IS A FORK THAT WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED TO MERGE BACK.

      A major point of Free software is to reduce the amount of wheel reinvention. Everybody gets to see and use everybody else's code. BSD-to-commercial forks provide a major impediment to that.

      So what damage accrued to BSD or TCP users as a consequence?

      MS TCP-users were not able to take advantage of the advances to the BSD stack, and are now stuck with a crippled version. This is the whole point.

  2. In other news.... by rokzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Women should give up their personal rights to make it easier on people who want to rape them.

  3. Less incentive to develop by dukerobinson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    if this were to happen, which I find highly unlikely, for one thing there would be a fork straight away. It would be just like the Xorg and Xfree split. Also, under the bsd license commercial proprietary software can integrate the open-source work, so why would anyone slave away at developing linux, only to have their work immediately integrated into commercial applications, the original developers not to see a dime. There is all kinds of bsd code in windows, for example.

    1. Re:Less incentive to develop by rokzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      no it doesn't. that's like saying being able to kill people increases your freedoms.

      it may be true for a minority of people who want to kill, but it means that EVERYONE loses the "freedom" to feel secure against random deadly attack.

      taking it further, the most free society is one with no laws whatsoever, but in such a society freedoms can be easily lost.

      the GPL is like "Civilisation for Software" - it may mean you lose some freedoms, but in return the freedoms it gives are protected.

    2. Re:Less incentive to develop by Trelane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This isn't about Microsoft, although it could well be (they can't use GPLed code like they use BSD'ed code in Windows).

      It's actually a very different, very critical point: if there were no GPL, Red Hat, Novell, and others could very well release their own binary-only kernels/utilities and the Linux world would fragment like the Unix world. It's the GPL that's holding the Linux community together.

      For instance, say that SuSE gets 90% of the Linux "marketshare." They then start introducing changes in the kernel and standard software stack which other vendors (hardware/software) rely on, due to their market dominance (sound familiar?). However, we note that, in order to be Linux and use the Linux kernel/software stack, they must release the changes back to the world under the GPL. Thus, Red Hat, Gentoo, Debian, and others all can stay 100% compatible with SuSE despite SuSE setting the de facto Standard. If SuSE comes up with Licensing 6.0 and tries to coerce their users into it, the users have much less of a barrier to switching away to other Linux distros because of this compatibility! Thus SuSE's power is checked despite monopoly position.

      Now, there is fragmentation in the Linux community due to different distros relying on different software, and having slightly different systems and configurations. This can be mitigated, however, by following the Linux Standard Base, and we must encourage our distros to follow the standard and work to develop the standard to prevent this fragmentation. It should be a fairly easy problem to fix, of a much different order than the problem with the binary unix compatibility fragmentation.

      --

      --
      Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
    3. Re:Less incentive to develop by kanly · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This whole thread seems based on the premise that you actually could, in some way, relicense Linux under the BSD license. This isn't as easy as you might think.

      Relicensing checklist:

      1. Go to Linus, and get him to release the portions of Linux that he owns under the new license.
      2. Armed with his blessing, go to each person who's ever contributed code, and get them to sign on. Last time I looked, this was at least a few tens of thousands of coders. Some are deceased, so you will have to get permission from their heirs.
      3. Ask the FSF to release glibc under the new license. Wear body armor.
      4. Go through every userspace program you want. If it is GPL'd, either get the author to relicense, write a replacement, or do without. Good luck trying to even find all the authors, let alone get them on board.

      It's widely considered that even Linus Himself could not push through a license change. No need to worry about a corporation doing it.

      If you want something under the BSD license, you might want to use BSD.

  4. All your software are belong to us! by bap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's an article? People who want money for nothing demand a gift with no string attached? Their message to the authors of Linux: "All your software are belong to us!"

    1. Re:All your software are belong to us! by Bastian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What the author is really asking for is for Linux to transition from this bizarro-world that many businesses are afraid of and can't understand to the nice simple regimented money-based world they are used to.

      In this world, if you get something for free (as in beer), you should be able to do anything you want with it. They can't understand the idea of nonmonetary compensation. The idea of, "You can use it, but if you try to do anything else with it you have to let us use your version, too." comes across as some sort of wacky bait-and-switch. The whole thing gets broken into two parts:
      1. It's yours. Take it.
      2. No, wait, WE WANT YOUR SOUL! SOUUUULLLS! RARRRRRRRRR!
      (Of courrse, it doesn't help that MySQL AB really does try to do the above.)

      I'm sure it's frightening for lots of business folks. They don't like it when they can't pretend to understand what's going on.

  5. Not even an article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a commentary, AKA an opinion piece. Look, I can write an opinion piece, too.

    Microsoft should switch to the GPL.

    Hey, someone submit this to Slashdot. Here's an idea for the text. "Slashdot has an article suggesting Microsoft should switch to the GPL."

  6. Why don't they mention FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are there any practical reasons they can't use FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD instead of Linux in situations where a BSD-style license is preferred over GPL?

    Or is it simply because they've never heard of it due to lack of marketing?

  7. No can do! by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If it's GPL'd, then everything up to the license chance would still be GPL'd, and it would immediately fork into GPL'd and non-GPL'd.

    Of course, then the BSD licensed stuff would be copied back into the GPL'd fork, as is allowed.

    Result - A full-featured GPL'd version, and a non-GPL'd version without all the features that it can't include as it would be a violation of the GPL.

    In other words, why bother? It ain't broke - don't try to "fix" it.

  8. Lamest.... article.... ever.... by gsfprez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    in light of IBM's use of the GPL to shutdown a major copyright infringer, SCO...

    and in light that this author decided to publish an outdated article - he continues to talk about how IBM is being sued for copyright infringement, while the hunter is now the hunted in the SCO vs IBM case with IBM arguing (very well) for partial summary judgement that IBM is 100% in the clear on Linux while its SCO who is now clearly in violation of copyright law...

    but mostly because his very first premise is utterly false - "How does software owned by everyone and by no one survive in a world where copyrights and patents shape the legal landscape?"..

    this article is lame...

    Dear Mr. Wildstrom.

    The GPL has NOTHING to do with your precious IP or ownership of software. The GPL is ONLY about two simple things - distribution and use. Just like EVERY SINGLE OTHER software license.

    It is obvious you do not understand this. I suggest you read the two latest court documents from IBM, who are doing two things you claim the GPL does not allow...

    1. claiming ownership of their GPL licensed software and
    2. are asking the courts to prevent a copyright infringer from reditributing their software without their permission.

    The easiest way to understand how the GPL works and why it works is to read those court documents - because its heart is exactly what the GPL is about - controlled distribution of owned software by the copyright holder.

    As my history teacher was fond of saying to the kids that wrote their papers the night before as they watched The A-Team - "please grasp the concept, then rewrite your paper".

    --
    guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
  9. Re:Leave me alone by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly, i think most serious open source coders are well aware of what the license they choose means. I specifically choose GPL instead of LGPL for a library i'm writting because that's what i wanted.

    I'm sorry if our licenses arn't corporate friendly.

    --
    - These characters were randomly selected.
  10. Re:Simple BSD allows rape by eviltypeguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "rape"...

    I write just about everything under a 3-clause BSD license. Do you know why? Because when I write something and give it away, it's really free to do whatever you want with (except of course claim it's your own).

    While some people think it's "rape", there are many of us who write code, that picked a BSD license because we want anybody to be able to use our code without restrictions other than claiming it's their own. So software can be a true gift without any "strings" attached. So it isn't "rape".

    Just the opinion of a programmer who writes BSD-licensed software...

  11. Re:And of course... by oolon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was just saying the GPL rather a good method for attracting contributions, not that it was the only way. Companies (who are the copyright owner) can even use it to showcase the code and allow commerical licencing to companies if required (trolltech for example). If trolltech offered a BSD version they would have never sold anything. XFree86 which was BSD had alot of problems attracting manufactures to contribute driver code, evenually having to go down the binary route as a result. GPL seems a better half way house to me... but thats me I like GPL alot more than BSD licence.

    James