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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."
If it were under the BSD license, Microsoft would have adopted it by now, under the hood, invisibly. Windows popularity would soar even more, and its reputation for stability and speed would have made Linux distributions obsolete, thus putting a stop to all independent peer-reviewed Linux development, leaving it to Microsoft, where it belongs. Then, with the lack of competition, Microsoft would stumble, dropping the ball, possibly scoring yet another own goal, and another Unix-lookalike would spring up, only this time the developers would be so mad about Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish of Linux that they would adopt a new license, called ... the GPL!
And ESR would have another chance to get it right.
Infuriate left and right
Agreed that GPL may not have been the most important ingredient in linux's success. But can you imagine how many people would take away your code and claim as their own, sell it and not give back to the commnuity had it not been for the copyleft "GPL"?
http://www.rajeshgoli.com
I know that this is going to degenerate into a licensing argument about his comments on the GPL (which I don't agree with), but please read the whole interview, as ESR talks about a lot of other interesting non-GLP issues too.
We don't need that pesky constitution thing anymore, either. I mean, it was nice at the beginning and all, but it's just getting in the way of corporate profits now. What with the DMCA, the Patriot act, and others like it, it's mainly a sort of social signal rather than a legal document with teeth.
Looks like ESR has gone over the edge, finally. I've always been more a fan of Free Software than of Open Source, but in the end I always thought OS is just the marketing name for FS.
The GPL is the one well-thought out licence, and AFAIK it's the only Free/Open-Source Software license ever to actually stand up in court.
ESR, shut the fuck up, you've done your good deeds, now don't start destroying it all just because you're not in the spotlight anymore.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
ESR is such a troll.
He's just sour he couldn't come up with the GPL in the first place. All he has done with his so-called "open source initiative" is try to steal the FSF's thunder. The guy is chronically jalous of RMS.
If not, he would acknowledge that the GPL is far more than the licence of Linux. Truth is, the GPL is the constitution of the Free Software movement. As such, it protects all software under it. Not just Linux.
KHTML isn't the biggest project out there, but it's in the top few % for size and complexity, I'd bet. Imagine what a private company could do to a smaller project.
Having homebrew licenses for every piece of software is "simpler, less arcane?"
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Thanks to GPL weve got thousands of pieces of codes that the community can both learn from and distribute amongst each other.
Dont even think for a minute that the world is so "well-adapted" and would play nice if we took away GPL.
Let me take http://www.blender3d.org/ as an example. The community bought this excellent piece of 3d software free from the grasp of shareholders and re-licensed it to GPL.
Thanks to that, its relatively safe from its actual competitors such as Discreet(AutoDesk), Alias etc. This program is so powerful that it actually can compete with the big ones, I know... I use it commercially today to develop artworks for ad-campaings that bring food on the table, but the GPL license made it affordable for me to get a "start" on my own instead of having to invest thousands of dollars into expensive 3d-software.
The big companies see us as potential customers as long as Blender where inferior to their software, but now as it has grown bigger...and more companies/personal users etc. are using it...
Dont go thinking theyll play it nice forever...losing customers theyll look for an "edge" somewhere...such as a license infringement...maybe code or functions that are equal to theirs SUE SUE SUE!
Darl McBride anyone?
We need GPL, now more than ever!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"I don't think the GPL is the principal reason for Linux's success..."
Someone's been hanging around too many honest engineers. This statement grossly underestimates the selfishness of people and corporations as well as the impact of a strong legal system. Look, I'm not saying the GPL is the only important factor but I can't logically see linux existing in anywhere near its current form without it. Even if most individuals would respect other people's work (and that's retardedly naive) some people and most corporations will not. In fact, corporate management has a fiduciary duty to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders and they're under a lot of pressure to do it. There are MUCH easier (and proven) ways to make high margin profits with software than the open source model. Without legal teeth to enforce keeping software in the community it simply wouldn't happen. It's pretty safe to assume that nearly all people and companies act in their short term self interest first and foremost. Always. No exceptions.
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".
Alternativly they just don't read it properly.
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GPLed program.
Those companies try to make you believe they have this huge pile of code and they add a little bit of GPL code. It usually is the other way around: they use huge amounts of GPL code (e.g. an entire kernel) and add a little bit off their own.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Here is what would happen if someone infringing upon the GPL ever refused to settle:
(Paraphrased from a talk given by Ebden Moglen. I don't remember which it was, but I think it was one of the ones linked from that article.)
The GPL isn't the problem. It's the mob who enforces "GPL violations" by:
1) Not having the slightest idea what the GPl requires. (See countless "They don't have downloadable source code on their website! GPL violation!!!" stories here.)
2) Declaring violations of "the spirit of the GPL" that pretty much cover anything "the community" decides it deserves and isn't getting.
The recent Safari-KHTML brouhaha indicates why companies face risk from even the most careful use of others' GPL code.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
But your example of Apple proves his point, somewhat. Apple used code with a BSD license. Do you really think Apple would have made such a decision if it had to comply with the GPL? I certainly don't think so.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Much has been made of the difference in philosophy of the "free software" and "open source" camps (too much, perhaps); this is a pretty clear statement of Eric's perspective.
I've read the article and some of what he said is just plain wrong. For instance:
> NetBSD is a worthy project, but, let's face it,
> the fan base for it simply is not large enough to
> justify spending marketing effort to recruit them.
I agree that NetBSD is cool and appreciate all their hard work. It's allowed me to have a modern desktop on my Solaris 8 system at work without having root privileges. No Linux, not even Gentoo can claim to be able to do that.
That being said, the xBSDs were actually ahead of Linux in the late 1990s. The xBSDs were more widely deployed for enterprise systems. But Linux still overtook them. The initial fan base isn't really an issue.
It's also not the applications issue. NetBSD can pretty much run any app that's on Linux. There may be a bit lag (since the apps are developed on Linux most of the time and there's a bit of a porting effort), but the apps get there without too much time.
It's not the compile your own source code culture of the xBSDs since pkg_add supports binary packages, and Gentoo has more popularity than the xBSDs. There is also version of Debian for the xBSDs.
It's not even the kernel. A few years back, the BSD was superior in many ways, but Linux still outstripped it.
When all is said and done, there is only one key difference between Linux and BSD, the license. Companies like IBM don't mind GPLing their technology for the same reason TrollTech doesn't mind GPLing Qt....If anyone wants to use it in a commercial product, they have to pay IBM, TrollTech, Sleepycat, etc for the right to take the code prorietary. And although your competitors may have access to your source code, they can't do anything with it without releasing their changes so you can benefit from it. When a company GPLs their product, they haven't really given it away.
GPL is a quid pro quo license (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours). Businesses understand quid pro quo and use it every day as a means of getting things done.
BSD is a charity license. As far as businesses are concerned, charity is good, but business is business and the last thing you want to do is give charity to your competitors.
It's not politically correct to say this, but "it really is the license, stupid".
There is a difference between adopting an open standard and replicating a code base.
Software monoculture leads to catastrophic failures in a connected world. Look how Ultrix, which had a (somewhat) independent code base, was immune to the Cornell worm when most of the Unices dropped off the Internet nearly simultaneously. Would it have been better to have every box on the Internet die? Or was it better for the VMS, MVS, and Ultrix machines to stay on-line?
Re-inventing the wheel is not always a bad thing. Your wheel can have cleats and sipes the old one didn't have, and still be bolt-on compatible.
His choice of words shows how little he understands, after all this time. Infectious implies that you have no control over it. But you do... you can choose not to be infected, write your own damn code.
GPL is about "converting" in the religious sense. Is this a bad thing? You tell me. You can choose not to be converted, and continue making excuses why you are so stingy with your source code, or you can share it freely. Be stingy, I don't care, but don't expect me to continue giving all my source code to you, so you can go off and sell it...
Sure, George.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Okay... to clear up...
KHTML is NOT GPLed. It is under the LGPL. The names sound similar but this is a really, really serious distinction. The LGPL is much more loose and is a lot closer to BSD than GPL-- it basically says "you have to release changes you make to these files in this project, but you can take these files and dump it into something larger and you don't have to do anything to the rest of your project, so long as these files when taken as an independent unit still work". This means that changes and fixes to the LGPLed work must be contributed back, but additions, well, contributing those back are pretty much optional.
If KHTML had been GPLed, the entire Safari situation would have been different. For one thing, it very possibly wouldn't have happened. The GPL probably asks enough that Apple wouldn't have found it acceptable-- they're apparently OK with releasing source to WebCore or WebKit or whichever it is, but they probably wouldn't have been happy with having to open source Safari, or having to force any OS X developers linking against WebCore[Kit?], a system service, to open source. If KHTML had been GPLed Apple would have just gone and used their other option for a plug-in rendering engine, the mozilla/firefox project, which is available under the MPL (and soon the LGPL as well)-- which is even less restrictive than the LGPL from Apple's perspective.
But, let's hypothetically say KHTML had been GPLed and Apple had accepted this. What then? Well, then the situation vondo describes couldn't have occurred. Apple could have forked and written better code than the open source community, but that would be okay-- because they would have no control over their fork. I or you or anyone else in the world could have just downloaded safari.tar.gz, forked apple's fork, made one tiny improvement, and released it on the internet. Tada! The open source community has outdone Apple!
But that isn't an option here in real life. In real life, Apple's released WebKit/KHTML, but that's not a full product. It's a rendering engine. It can't really do anything by itself.
And what this means is that even though Apple's released their source, the Open Source community can't keep up with them. You could technically take WebKit and stuff it into Konqueror (and it would be interesting to try, I'm suprised no one has yet). But this would require some integration work, plus it still wouldn't at all stand up to Safari due to the value added by the parts of Safari which remain proprietary.
So while the LGPL, a less-"pure" license than the GPL, lead to a commercial use of an LGPLed library which is beneficial to the commercial user, beneficial to the open source project, and beneficial to others-- this is the exact thing ESR is trying to encourage!-- 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. RMS, were he here and someone had let him off his leash, would probably point out that this is one of the reasons you want to be using the GPL instead of the LGPL or BSD or MPL licenses in the first place!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
There's no "considered to be GPL'd". The libraries are GPLed or not GPLed, and if they are GPLed then you have to use the GPL for any programs that use them, that's the entire point of them being GPL. They're there as a carrot to encourage you to use GPL for your programs. People who use the GPL for their libraries don't want you using them in a propriety work. It's not like your any worse off than if they'd never been written, and without the GPL they may well not have been.
I am trolling
and a clown to boot. Now if Stallman said something I'd listen. But Stallman won't air such bullshit. GPL is the sole reason why Linux exists and progresses. It doesn't allow lage companies to create and extend their own closed flavors of linux, kinda like it happened with UNIX two decades ago. More precisely, they can create and extend their own flavors (like Google does), they just can't redistribute them without giving away the new IP.
Consider Sun Microsystems, whose SunOS operating system was based on BSD. What did they give back? Other than a few bug fixes early on, nothing.
Ultrix, from Digital Equipment, was BSD-based. Little to nothing came back to BSD from DEC.
Remember OSF/1, which was based on Mach/BSD? How much of their work went back? Next to nothing.
Microsoft used the BSD TCP stack as the basis of their TCP stack. What did they give back? Nothing.
FTP software based their whole product suite on the BSD codebase. How much came back? Nothing.
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.
Lots of people think of the GPL as a "communist" license, but in fact it is BSD that is the free-for-all. The BSD license attaches no value to what it is licensing, and as a result you a software "tragedy of the commons" where everyone is happy to use it but almost nobody ever gives anything back. I know that there are going to be people who vehemently disagree with what I'm going to say, but: 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).
The GPL, on the other hand, leverages the fact that the source base is valuable. It is not a "give away" as so many people claim but rather an intellectual property trade very much like the patent sharing agreements so common in the proprietary world. While businesses would rather get something for nothing, if what they're getting in trade is valuable enough it is an incentive to give up some of their own rights.
If you think of the GPL as an intellectual property collective agreement you have the right idea. The thing about that kind of agreement is that the more IP that is covered by it the more valuable the collective becomes -- and therefore the more likely others are to join it.
In Linux' case the source base is exceptionally valuable at this point, worth literally billions of dollars, and for the better part of a decade has been receiving significant code donations from corporations. Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support? All of them. For something like a decade corporations have been making major code donations back to the Linux codebase and it has advanced tremendously as a result. While Linux certainly has its rough edges it has seriously outgrown its tinkerer beginnings.
So Raymond could not be more wrong about this point. Oh, I agree that the development structure that Torvalds set up was a principal contributor to its success. 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. But BSD has branched enough times that it has also seen conditions similar to what Linux enjoyed and it still never turned the corner.
What made Linux win was simply that large corporations had to give to get, and the more times that happens the more likely it becomes.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I'm getting pretty sick of this argument.
Any professional developer* worth anything will ask the following questions when investigating a library for use in a product:
It's not Rocket Surgery - I do this as a matter of course when evaluating libraries at work.
It is Job #1. Not Job #DoItAfterWeShip.
Sure, the GPL might scare people off using a library, but then...so what? If they don't want to share, then they write the code themselves. Their choice. If they don't want to share, I'm not saying that's 'evil', just that they don't get the benefit of the free software someone else produced on the condition that others share too. I myself have been in both positions, and whether you choose to use GPL software for a particular task is specific to what you are doing. You make a choice and you move on.
Whining about the license stopping you use a library is like whining about the price of a commercial library stopping you using the library. In either case it doesn't do you any good, and to paraphrase Linus, whoever wrote the code gets to decide the license and the cost, and nobody else gets to complain.
But this "we used GPL'd code without doing even the most basic license checks on our libraries, and now we have to release our code! no fair!" stuff is just bullshit. They fucked up. They're idiots. End of story.
As for 'holding developers back', it's a bit like calling out a roadside recovery service when you break down in your car, and getting upset when they tell you they will charge you. "You won't tow me unless I pay you? If I don't agree to your terms, I'll have to do it without you?! You're holding me baaaaaaaack, man!"
* Or any developer worth anything, come to that.