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We Don't Need the GPL Anymore
jpkunst writes "In a lengthy interview with Eric S. Raymond by Federico Biancuzzi at O'Reilly's onlamp.com, ESR defends his position that 'Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it.'" From the article: "I don't think the GPL is the principal reason for Linux's success. Rather, I believe it's because in 1991 Linus was the first person to find the right social architecture for distributed software development. It wasn't possible much before then because it required cheap internet; and after Linux, most people who might otherwise have founded OS projects found that the minimum-energy route to what they wanted was to improve Linux. The GPL helped, but I think mainly as a sort of social signal rather than as a legal document with teeth."
They didn't take BSD and 'create a whole OS'. Slashbots often whine about the 'strings ftp.exe | grep 'University of California' shebang (I even saw it on someone's .sig once) but those that do display an amazing inability to understand commercial software development and the BSD model.
While shipping NT 3.1 Microsoft was under pressure to add TCP/IP so they bought a commerically available stack rather than write it themselves. This commercial offering was a BSD derivative -- completely legally. For NT4 Microsoft rewrote the stack substantially, retaining old bits for backward compatibility. If this is 'stealing' from BSD, we should just scrap the BSD licence since it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Go somewhere random
...then why isn't one of the BSDs the more popular open-source OS?
I think it's clear that the reason most open-source developers are inspired to work on Linux is the knowledge that their work won't be commercially exploited.
Oh, it has scary teeth. That's exactly why nobody bothers to fight it, and companies settle instead.
Shortly, it works like this: Company Foo infringes the GPL. If they go to court, they can try to argue the GPL doesn't apply - bad idea, since now it's entirely a copyright matter. And copyright says you can't take somebody else's stuff without permission, which means they're screwed.
Here's the thing, the GPL is the only thing that gives you the permission to redistribute the code. If you don't like it, that's fine, nobody forces you to agree to use it, but then the whole thing falls back to copyright law, which doesn't give you the permission to redistribute anything.
The GPL is unique in that it *grants* you privileges, instead of taking them away. Fighting the GPL will result in losing those privileges.
That's why nobody goes to court, because they wouldn't even be talking about the GPL there. They'd be deciding if there was or not copyright infringement.
With most companies "we don't wan't to open EVERYTHING we write" usually translates to "We just want to leach without giving anything back".
No, more often than not, the GPL software is a small component of a larger system (i.e. code to handle graphics formats). The GPL'ed code is not changed or improved, but somehow the communitiy expects to get all the other irrelevant code for free. This is what turns companies off to it.
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GPLed program.
You do if it is statically linked. Of course you can decouple the GPL code from your application, but you might take a penalty somewhere (in size, speed, or complexity). Most companies are not going to hassle with that and just pay someone $30,000 to write the widget.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GPLed program.
And even that's not entirely accurate. If you take GPL'd code, modify it, and use it in house, you don't have to release it. The ONLY time that you'd have to release code is when you're distributing a derivative work. For example, if you modify code, and then turn around and sell it, when you sell it, you also have to provide a copy of the source to the people who buy it. If you release it for download, you have to release your changes. That's it.
~Wx
sig?
it still wouldn't at all stand up to Safari due to the value added by the parts of Safari which remain proprietary.
What parts are those, precisely? I don't know of any parts of Safari which remain proprietary that are any kind of barrier to competition, or that are technically difficult to implement. Safari is a very thin shell around Webkit, and there are at least two open-source replacement shells (Sunrise Browser and Shiira).
use of the LGPL in this case has still created an effective barrier to the open source product being as useful or successful as the commercial project which is using its code.
I'm completely unable to understand how you would come to this conclusion. Safari itself only uses standard Mac OS X APIs, so Apple could have open-sourced all of Safari (and Dashboard, but that came later) without open-sourcing any other part of OS X, no matter what open-source license KHTML or Webkit was released under.
About all that placing KHTML (and thus Webkit itself) under the GPL instead of the LGPL might have done would be to keep Apple from using Webkit in Mail in Tiger, and make some third party products on OS X use one of the other HTML rendering packages instead. The only program I can think of that I use, that uses Webkit, is Adium. And that's already GPLed.
So, Apple has in fact released all the code that is needed for a third party (be that the KHTML team or Nokia) to duplicate "the commercial project which is using its code", just as they would as if KHTML had been released under the GPL. Apple could have created the kind of barrier that you're talking about, but they chose not to.
Unless there's some magic Safari goodness that programs like Shiira are missing (and I doubt that, Shiira already does more than Safari) I'm completely at a loss to understand what you're getting at here.
This is a 100% true statement.
The company I work for origionally had a CTO that was freaking out about GPL'd software.
It came to pass that he was simply acting that way because of the FUD and scaremongering that the MS rep he was buddy-buddy with was feeding him on a regular basis. After his "demands" and we presented a proposal for rewriting and purchasing everything needed to eliminate all GPL software in the business plus a letter from the Company's law firm telling him that the GPL is 100% harmless in every aspect unless we are shipping GPL code as or in a product.
The whining was still there, finance refused to approve a 2.2 million dollar budget line to buy all new MS and other commercial software as well as hiring programmers to rewrite from scratch some of the other solutions we rely on for revinue.
the GPL is not "dangerous" or "viral" and also is not scary in any way, shape, or form to anyone but someone trying to steal code, get something for nothing or are underinformed or relying on lies/bad information.
We proved it to a CTO that was pigheaded, must have his way, and trusts his personal friends more than the experts he hires.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yahoo!, Apple, and Pair Networks (in money) would probably argue against that.
The companies you mentioned probably use little if anything of the BSD code any longer.
I don't know of any major corporation which has made significant donations back to the BSD core. There may be the rare exception, but the bulk of corporate back-donations has been some bug fixes. That has left the development almost entirely to individual developers or very small groups, and thereby limited how much could be done.
Most companies hire contractors to contribute to the BSD's. You do not see many companies make big shows about it.
It has been my observation that the BSD source base has been relatively stagnant over more than a decade. If you look at what a modern BSD provides and compare it to what BSD 4.3 provided you'll find little that is new. A similar comparison with any major commercial UNIX will yield a great many such features (like working SMP support, journalled filesystems, NUMA support, logical volume management, realtime support, etc).
Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support?
When will Linux support Soft Updates? When will Linux use sysctl() instead of
To be sure, one of the major limitations in the BSD codebase has been the reluctance of the BSD principals to accept code they didn't write.
Huh? That does not match to what happens within the BSD communities. Maybe, you are thinking about the Linux community?