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!"

Comments

Asymmetry

[tfb]

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.

Obrigado

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Wanting stuff for free so you can sell it

[Vicegrip]

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.