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Sun's Schwartz Attacks GPL
jskelly writes "Sun Micro President Jonathan Schwartz
attacked the GPL at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco yesterday.Other than the same old arguments (you can't make it proprietary later)
he adds that it imposes on developing nations
"a rather predatory
obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world" -- but fails to mention that the converse is also true: the wealthiest nation in the world is similarly, under the GPL, forced to "disgorge all its IP back to the developing nations" as well. Duh!"
Wow, in one breath he talks about how GPL is bad because it doesn't allow you to keep your changes secret. He also talks about how he will not open source java for fear of forking. Then he says that companies like IBM who help Linux but don't open up all their products are "hypocrits".
Wow this guy really needs help from the cluestick.
He's quite probably right about the developing world.
The owner of the copyright is free to license it however they like. In particular they can do the standard dual-licensing trick that is done by people like sleepycat, with a GPLd version which is free as well as a more liberal one, which you pay for. Other people are not free to do this.
Most code will (initially, anyway) originate in the developed world. People in the developing world are poor, and will therefore very likely use it under the GPL, and therefore contribute changes back to the developed world (and to the developing world of course). Users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version.
This would not happen with a BSD-style license, for instance.
You don't have to GPL apps you distribute, just because they run on a GPL'd OS, or interop with GPL'd apps. Opening one's source is an opportunity, not an obligation, to get communities of coders to use and improve your code. The GPL obligations are perfectly balanced with their benefits, even though some benefits are unencumbered by any obligations.
--
make install -not war
Without any obligation to give anything back. Yep, and you're all damned communists for not wanting to support a free ride for Sun.
His crying for the third-world is doubly laughable hogwash since it ignores completely that the GPL works in two directions and in the same way for each. Then it ignores that it is the insanely expensive nature of western software that makes much of our vaunted technology inaccessible to them to begin with.
Finally, as we've done at my company, if you really want to use GPLed code why don't you try purchasing a different license from its developer. They might not be interested, of course, or it might not be possible due to multiple copyright owners, but a number of interesting open source projects do dual-license. It's a nice arrangement: developer gets a nice wad of cash and continues to own their code and work on it and the company gets its product done faster and consequently they get to the market faster.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Yes, the GPL does harm open source. After all, look at how Linux lingers in relative obscurity while the three BSDs are the darling of mass media.
After all, I was just watching a repeat of The Dave Chappelle Show last night on which there was a bit called "PopCopy" about a Kinko's-like copy store and how to be uncooperative to customers. In the bit, he mentions BSD, right? Oh, wait, no...he says Linux. Why? Because Linux is mainstream and it wouldn't have gotten where it is today without the GPL.
I think saying the GPL hurts open source is ridiculous. On a case-by-case basis, you might be able to effectively demonstrate where another license would be better and thankfully, there are other licenses available in those instances. But the GPL is a vital part of the success of Open Source software.
What harms Open Source is Microsoft embedding the BSD TCP/IP stack but how many end users ever heard of BSD? And Apple half-assing their cooperation with Open Source to make OS X. How many end users running OS X ever heard of BSD even though their very OS is based upon it? But the chances they've heard of Linux is much higher. Appple, Microsoft, and the BSD license they've taken advantage of to take other people's work without compensation has arguably harmed Open Source. But, hey, the people who put that stuff out there under the BSD license did that of their own free will and more power to them. If it weren't for that, we might not have a standardized TCP/IP stack today...God knows if Microsoft had to write their own they'd have probably fucked it up entirely.
(imho)