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."

Comments

Re:He's right, of course

[bheer]

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.

Re:Just how much of the document has teeth, anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[zerocool^]

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

Re:BSD is a great example of what doesn't work

[Ded Bob]

Actually BSD is the project I use to show exactly the opposite. While it's true there have been many individuals who have contributed to BSD, many major corporations have taken very significant code out of it and given back ... nothing.

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).

• FreeBSD has working SMP support. A few things are still under the GIANT lock, but most are esoteric devices.
  
• Journaling is currently being added.
  
• USB support existed in the BSD's--I believe NetBSD had it first--about two years before Linux.
  
• Jails have existed in FreeBSD for quite some time.
  

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 /proc? How about virtual channels on a sound card? I do not need to run a software multiplexer to run multiple applications on my sound card with FreeBSD.

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? ;)