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Businessweek Recommends License Switch for Linux
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."
Even if this were a good idea (which it's not - it's roughly on a par with somebody who is being attacked by rabid hyenas deciding that they'd be safer if they distracted the hyenas by attaching large chunks of fresh meat all over their body), it would require that either:
a) Anybody with significant (as in more than 20-30 lines or so) contributions to the kernel give their approval for the switch, and it ain't gonna happen because even if Linus went for it, Alan Cox is very much pro-GPL and has large chunks of code all over the kernel
or:
b) Somebody strip out or rewrite all parts of the kernel copyrighted by people who objected to the license change, which in the end would probably amount to an effective rewrite of the whole thing.
I don't understand how switching to another license (BSD, Mozilla, etc.) would protect the kernel from patent infringement suits.
I do see how it would make it more "commercial" friendly, but IMO, that's all it would do. If it were licensed under BSD, then companies such as MS, Apple, etc. could take the kernel, use it, change it or whatever w/o showing the changes... just like Apple has done with much of the FreeBSD code.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
BusinessWeek's readers are businesspeople.
Business is about making money.
There are two ways to make money.
1. Visionaries and geniuses can create buzzwords.
2. Everyone else can jump on the buzzwords as soon as they realize that the buzzwords are buzzwords.
BusinessWeek caters to the second group because it's a market several orders of magnitude larger.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
Linux is a buzzword. *BSD is not.
This means that all the buzzword people jumped on Linux.
This guarantees that in the future, Linux will have more buzzwords than BSD.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
The next important rule with buzzwords is that you have to take a convoluted path to get to your buzzwords.
This is the rule that explains why we have a group of people working hard at developing Linux for the Macintosh as well as a group of people working hard at developing Darwin for the PC.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
(** note: The author realizes that there are indeed practical reasons to make many of the decisions mentioned above. In fact, he has jumped on a couple of the bandwagons mentioned above, both for practical reasons and because of buzzword bandwagoning. The problem is systemic, has been around for thousands of years, and can only be solved by the GPL.)
This article stems from a flawed assumption, namely, that the Linux development team really cares whether businesses switch to Linux or not. Linux was written by people who wanted "software that doesn't suck," not people who thought "Hey, let's write a bunch of neat-o code and put it out there and maybe a bunch of businesses will be interested."
In fact the article has it 100% backwards. Rather than Linux switching licenses to appeal more to the business crowd (which of course ain't gonna happen), business should start thinking of software in terms of software as a service -- not a web service, but a service like electricity or plumbing. Once that happens and businesscritters start realizing that you can use Linux in your enterprise without scaring off your employees or having to release all your internal software into the public domain, the arguments over lower TCO will start to take hold.
Someone you trust is one of us.
In this world, if you get something for free (as in beer), you should be able to do anything you want with it.
Interestingly the business world seems quite happy with the concept that if you pay for it you certainly can't do anything you want with it. Witness software licensing, the RIAA, and many other practices that amount to "You bought it? So what, you can only do what we tell you to do with it". It seems odd that while this is perfectly acceptable practice, if they get something for free they can't comprehend that there might still be the same sort of strings attached.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The GPL has rarely been to court precisely because its implications are clear. Violators settle quickly because the alternative is to stop shipping product. Grumblings about "murky" license terms amount to nothing more than sour grapes.
In any case, changing Linux's license is a practical impossibility. Hundreds of people and companies own bits of it, and all would have to agree to a change. Linux is condemned to retain the source of its success indefinitely.
BSD has a few forks.
Linux has many forks.
Main-line linux, as on kernel.org
Red Hat Linux, with a modified (forked) kernel.
Various patch sets that haven't (yet) made it into the main line.
By applying different combinations of patch sets, you can have more different possible kernels, this is before you start configuring, than there are places to put those kernels.
The critical difference is that Red Hat 2.6 is a fork from the main-line 2.6 not a 2.6 fork of Red Hat 2.4. Forks that aren't worth keeping up with just wither and die. Linux gives the outward appearance of not forking, because there is about as much merging as there is forking.
Yes I see your point it was badly worded by me, there is no way to prove that the donations came cos of the GPL or just because it large. As clearly small projects are likely to attract less donations. However I do believe the GPL has helped attract contributions (both personal and corporate), as I believe the GPL offers better protection from the abuse of a gift of code. It is also interesting that BSD which was more advanced (some would claim still is) when Linux started yet failed to catch on. Perhaps that was more because of the development model rather than the license? As you point out, we can't know the answers.
James
What has always struck me about the widsom of the BSD license was that it was a way for Regents of the University of California to make available work that was presumably owned by the State of California for the benefit of all commercial entities -- the lion's share of which are/were? in Silicon Valley.
But the work of tens of thousands of individuals across the world, unaffiliated except by a mutual common interest, would not be protected by such a BSD license. The GPL is better suited for that, as several other posters have noted.
If linux did switch to the BSD license, and Microsoft did indeed fork and make their own proprietary version, that does not nullify Linus' own repository
Please remove your head from the clouds.
This is not a battle which is at the capitulation point of a killing stroke. Microsoft would love to have a chance to sink their programmers into Linux. They would devote 250% manpower to it. Within a year Microsoft would patent every single functional feature which they add to Linux. They would patent a "window manager integrated with a kernel" by stuffing KDE into the kernel. Within two years Linus and the FSF would receive a cease and desist order for violation of patents.
So what bad came out of the for the BSD folks?
The BSD folks are poster children and special cases. They were granted their immunity when they beat the AT&T suit. BSD won the AT&T suit only because of its social and political connections. No modern programmer could even pray for such a blessed immunity.
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