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

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this guy is sensible. Dismiss him with the contempt he deserves, and go do something more worthwhile - like reading Dilbert or hating on Intarweb Exploder...

He's right, of course

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

Re:He's right, of course

[millahtime]

If it were under the BSD license...

If what you said were true why didn't Microsoft take say FreeBSD and do the same thing? It's BSD Licensed, UNIX based and a pretty solid system.

Re:He's right, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

They Did.

Re:He's right, of course

[dj28]

That's a ridiculous argument.

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and all the other operating systems based on the BSD license were not made obsolete by Microsoft, even if they do use some BSD code. The introduction of BSD code into Microsoft Windows did not magically make it a superior operating system. Neither would Linux code in Windows.

Your entire argument is a straw man.

Re:He's right, of course

[Ingolfke]

Apache doesn't use the GPL and last time I checked IIS was losing group to Apache.

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:He's right, of course

[91degrees]

Yes, there's several bits and pieces of BSD code in Windows, but that's not the point. They never decided to simply extend BSD for their own OS. Presumably they wouldn't have done the same with Linux even without the GPL. The difference between the two operating systems isn't that great.

Apple did simply embrace and extend BSD. Nobody seemed to mind, and Apple ended up with a rather good OS.

Re:He's right, of course

[Egregius]

And Apple has and is contributing back, and MS hasn't contributed anything back so far.

Re:He's right, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not stealing, it's just BSD. MS did it legally, and couldn't do the same with GPLed SW. And that was the main motive behind GPL.

Re:He's right, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

An argument which is often used against the BSD licence, is that code can be "taken" and made proprietary.

And ?

Does this make the original BSD code non available ? The answer is no.

Does this make the original BSD code trapped ?
The answer is no.

So what happens ?

We have BSD code and people can grab it to build upon it. This has no impact on the free code itself and it is still available to us.

What does happen in the long term ?

Company X takes BSD code and builds on it. When the next release of the BSD code appears, they have to integrate their changes to the new version. This costs time and money.

And the risk is that BSD people could make changes that heavily break their own proprietary code.

In the long term, and as we get important changes to the BSD code, they will understand that their benefits are to release their code to the BSD people. Hoping that some of their stuff will get integrated into the BSD base, because the more of it gets there, the less work they will have to do.

If we base ourselves our real world facts concerning this, company X starts building on BSD code and keeps their changes proprietary. After some time, they will open the code and propose it as they build more code they won't release immediatly.

The BSD and GPL licences are complementary. We should use BSD licence for code we want to spread as much as possible like formats, protocols. TCP/IP was spread in part because of this in an era where each vendor tried to push his own proprietary network protocols.

The GPL licence should be used to protect everything that could have a value in the commercial world that we want to protect like office-like programs and so on.

This idea of complementary BSD-GPL licences does come from a friend called Emmanuel Dreyfus, a NetBSD developer and the more I think about it, the clever it looks to me :)

(Gilbert Fernandes)
(gilbert.fernandes _at_ club-internet *dot* fr)

Re:He's right, of course

[bigman2003]

So the GPL is good because it keeps Microsoft from adopting open standards?

What if Microsoft incorporated more open software- would that be a good thing, or a bad thing?

Re:He's right, of course

[pesc]

So the GPL is good because it keeps Microsoft from adopting open standards?
No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack, you must give the improvements back to the community. M$ kept their improvements to themselves, legally and according to the BSD license. M$ weren't stealing. They just want to take and not give back.

Re:He's right, of course

[TheRaven64]

Apple did simply embrace and extend BSD. Nobody seemed to mind, and Apple ended up with a rather good OS.

NeXT took 4.3BSD and Mach 2.5, and built a kernel which used Mach to provide a hardware abstraction layer and key services (e.g. threads), BSD to provide a UNIX personality, and their own driver model. They licensed Display PDF from Adobe and built their AppKit on top of it. They created a BSD-derived userland with several of the BSD utilities. They added support for Objective-C to gcc, although this wasn't particularly useful without an Objective-C runtime - NeXT had one, and GNU now has one as well.

Apple bought NeXT (or NeXT bought Apple for a negative amount), stripped out the old 4.3BSD code and replaced it with 4.4BSD lites 2 code to make Rhapsody. They took some userland tools from NetBSD and created a Mac look and feel. A bit later, they updated more of the BSD code with bits from FreeBSD, which gave them a more modern kernel.

Saying that they did `simply embrace and extend BSD' is a gross oversimplification. You might like to compare the Darwin kernel source to any BSD kernel at some point and see how different it is. Sun (and other UNIX vendors) did simply embrace and extend (and extend a lot in some cases) BSD in the early days of commercial UNIX, although modern Solaris is a lot more SysV than BSD.

Re:He's right, of course

[IpalindromeI]

Please explain why it is critical. I honestly would like a good explanation of how the GPL is more beneficial to the programmer than a license such as BSD. If your intent is to share, why purposely step on the toes of someone who may want to take you up on the offer?

Re:He's right, of course

[m50d]

What if they don't worry about integrating their changes? If they make the fork once, and then maintain their own divergent version, like Apple is doing with Webcore. We now have what is effectively another open source web renderer - webcore has diverged sufficiently from khtml to count it separately. If khtml had been BSD, that would (probably, since they haven't displayed much concern for keeping the codebases compatible, so they wouldn't have much need to open it up) be one more closed source web renderer and one less open one.

What if the original maintainer has given up, and it needs a lot of porting to work on modern systems? With BSD software, where's the incentive to make the "new" version open source?

Re:He's right, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack

Do you have references for this assertion? What improvements were made to the stack that Unix stacks do not have?

This is the same old BS. It is *good* that they used it otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this over the Internet -- we'd be using the Microsoft Network (remember that?).

The *great* majority of clients out there are Microsoft Windows clients. If Microsoft hadn't accepted TCP/IP, they would all be using some Microsoft protocol and we'd be using Microsoft servers instead of free webservers on every platform. The fact that a monopoly can embrace an open standard makes it possible for non-monopoly players to play too.

Re:He's right, of course

[hymie]

The GPL is not meant to be beneficial to the programmer. The GPL is meant to be beneficial to the user, giving to the user the ability to read, modify, and redistribute the program. If this inconveniences the programmer, too bad. The programmer can choose not to use the code.

Re:He's right, of course

[unapersson]

"In short, they get recognition and attribution, and the satisfaction that someone out there didn't reinvent the wheel all over again."

But if they then want to implement the new enhanced features added to the closed source version, then they do have to reinvent the wheel again.

Re:He's right, of course

[Darth]

When Microsoft sold Zenix to SCO (back when they actually were in Santa Cruz), part of the deal was that Microsoft agreed to a non-compete clause that prohibited them from creating or marketing a unixlike operating system.

I am kinda curious who retains that contract. I imagine it follows the os portion of old-SCO and would now be in the care of McBride & Co.

Re:He's right, of course

[grammar fascist]

M$...

Hi. Are you twelve? Do you realize it makes you look like a total yutz when you do that?

You had a good point, but you lost me with the dollar signs. In writing circles, it's called a "roadblock." Try to avoid it.

Re:He's right, of course

[Zak3056]

The GPL, accessible guilt-free wide-spread piracy, and socialism are all related in that they remove the valuation of a product or service.

I disagree with you. More importantly (and far more influentually) the market disagrees with you. Ask IBM, HP, Intel, SGI, Disney, Pixar, Google--I could go on, but I won't--how much value GPL software has. Seems to me that the value of the Linux kernel alone is measured in billions--if not tens or even hundreds of billions--of dollars.

Beyond that, the comparison of GPL code to socialism (a comparison designed to equate the GPL with an idea many consider to be evil) is that the GPL is entirely opt-in. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a socialist or communist nation will find that the products of their labor are forcibly taken and given to others "more deserving" or who "need it more" with the alternative being prison or death. On the other hand, engaging in the development of--or using--software licensed under the GPL is entirely voluntary. RMS is not going to come to your house wearing jackboots and demand you use GCC.

Let's not beat around the bush--companies and individuals HAVE been screwed by productizing GPL software and finding either someone else doing the same, or getting threatening letters from the copyright owners demanding source code. To this, I say: they COULD have elected to develop from scratch, but instead opted to use someone else's work. Exactly why would a rational person expect to be able to take someone else's labor and profit from it without remuneration? THAT sounds more like a socialist state to me, while the GPL's quid-pro-quo sounds quite capitalist in comparison.

Re:He's right, of course

[master_p]

Beyond that, the comparison of GPL code to socialism (a comparison designed to equate the GPL with an idea many consider to be evil)

Important note: the above is valid only in USA, where there is tremendous propaganda against socialism. The rest of the world thinks otherwise.

Re:He's right, of course

[Knara]

I'd venture the problem is more with the reader in this case than the writer. Seeing as this isn't a formal, edited publication, I'd suggest you save yourself the time of writing this sort of pointless reply next time around.

Re:He's right, of course

[synthespian]

It doesn't change the fact that, under say a BSD license, the code base would still be there for everyone.
Your argument is highly flawed, because a company like Micro$oft would not choose GPL in the first place. Therefore, you have no contribution anyhow and your hypothesis is totally void of a probability of even coming into being. However, because the BSD license is unobtrusive, you have a higher probability that at least some code would merge back to the code base. We've seen this with Apple and FreeBSD. (I wish I knew some Bayesian theory, it can probably be explained with that ;-)) Anyhow, wether they merge back the code they evolved or not is completely irrelevant to you because your code is still there.
So, unless we factor in pyschological, moral, or political factors, the GPL makes less sense than the BSD license.
You have to understand the setting in which Stallman nurtured his idea of the Free Software movement. He was working in the MIT AI lab, they wanted to make money with Lisp machines, Symbolics came in and hired the best hackers of the lab under NDAs (Symbolics is a great lesson on failure, greed, and the Lisp Machine war probably hurt software development more than we can fathom) and Stallman was alone, the lab was torn apart, all the knowledge there under a NDA hood...And then the AT&T licensing problem with Unix...Back then, "everything was Free Software", there wasn't a need for licenses. But society changed, laws changed, corporations changed. And the hacker mentality gave in to the dot-com bubble and nowadays, those insane patents and lawsuits.
The BSD license represents the really true, free, "do what you like" mentality.
I believe it's a terrible misjudgement to expect every community to behave like the Linux community. Some communities don't: the BSD community, the Forth community (still in a wonderful hacker mindset), the Lisp community, the Delphi community, the Java community, etc., they're all very different and relate different to the issues of proprietary/free software.

GPL Teeth?

[millahtime]

Can anyone tell me if the GPLs teeth have been tested or evaluated? How sharp are they?

Re:GPL Teeth?

[pe1rxq]

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

Re:GPL Teeth?

[cortana]

It's strong enough that those who have fallen foul of its conditions in the past have always settled out of court.

Here is what would happen if someone infringing upon the GPL ever refused to settle:

Plaintiff: Your honour, the defendant is distributing my copyrighted work without a license. Please make him stop.

Judge: Stop it, defendant!

Defendant: Golly, I just spend thousands on legal fees to appear in a case I had no hope of winning.

(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.)

Re:GPL Teeth?

[dgb2n]

What I can tell you is that at least on the program I work (a major middleware software development for the Army being written by a "major" defense contractor"), the corporate attorneys are scared to death of the GPL.

LGPL is fine. Dual licensed open source products are fine where you can pay the developer for a license other than compliance with the GPL.

There are lots of reasons that companies and government entities don't want to expose all their source to the GPL including security considerations, protection of intellectual property etc.

The fear is not based on any doubt about the quality of open source/GPL code it is more a concern about the "viral nature" of the GPL. Even where changes are not made to the open source code and its dynamically linked with proprietary code, the attorneys will not allow it. We're actually paying to replace GPL components with non-GPL components to avoid any perceived risk of future litigation.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[arose]

Sounds like this: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/moglen-harvard-speec h-2004.html.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[saider]

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.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[pe1rxq]

If it is worth $30,000 it is not just some small irrelevant or trivial part....

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:GPL Teeth?

[mark-t]

And the reason for this is consistent with the Copyright act as it currently sits.

Since even without explicit permission from the Copyright holder, the Copyright act _does_ grant unlimited permission to copy a copyrighted work for personal use. It's the act of distributing in the first place that negates the notion of personal use, and that requires permission from the Copyright holder to do. The GPL grants said permission to all people that agree to its terms. If you don't agree, then all you have left is personal/private use, or are stuck trying to negotiate alternative terms with the copyright holders (which they are not under any obligation to provide).

Re:GPL Teeth?

[swv3752]

Though given a standard Font and underlining the name, it is not immediately obvious if pe1rxq ends in 'q' or 'g'.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[Tim Browse]

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:

1. Does it do what we want?
2. Are we allowed to use it, and what are the license conditions?

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.

Re:GPL Teeth?

[Leto2]

Actually, he spelled it corectly. You just don't know how to spell your nick...

GPL is very much needed

[rajeshgoli]

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"?

Re:GPL is very much needed

[SpartanVII]

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"?

CherryOS?

Re:GPL is very much needed

[m50d]

And notice how the community got them to stop? Wheras if it was BSD they would have been on the right side of the law and gotten away with it, and other people could have done so too.

RTFA

[Hieronymus Howard]

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.

While we're at it...

[DarkHand]

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.

ESR on drugs

[Tom]

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.

Re:ESR on drugs

[Cronopios]

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.

Exactly. He got it right with "The cathedral and the bazaar", but everything he has said or written ever since was crap.

Why does Slashdot keep publishing his idiocies?

Re:ESR on drugs

[ConceptJunkie]

If /. stopped posting idiocies, there would be like 3 people discussing the weather.

You know they often get more mileage out of a provocative article than an informative one.

Re:ESR on drugs

[hahiss]

I find myself sympathetic with this sort of response (after all, much of ESR's libertarianism is knee-jerk on a good day), but I think that there are two reasons not to want him to shut up:

(1) He makes an important point, even if it doesn't lead to the ``we doan need no steenkin' GPL" conclusion. The popularity of the linux kernel has a lot to do with community structure and excellent timing (w/re: technological advances). I think it is a bit much to suggest, as ESR seems to, that the GPL was just the window-dressing to make everyone feel right about Linux; it actually represents a fundamental rethinking of some standard conceptions of property. That is, the GPL is the codification of a moral reformation of the notion of (intellectual) property. ESR's suggestion is an interesting one, and it dovetails with his libertarian views about social organization. (Note, I'm not endorsing either his conlcusions about the GPL or his libertarianism. I don't think that the technological/social stuff is sufficient without a proper license---at least currently.)

(2) It can be useful to have creative and smart people articulate views that are unpopular as a check on the tendency toward mental inertia. Given what I say above, there is some use to asking whether the technology and social organization are sufficient to support Free Software independent of the GPL; it, in some sense, asks us to consider what our ideals are in supporting Free Software (if there are any, and if we do).

It's not the GPL that makes people nervous

[SpaceLifeForm]

It's the attack against GPL via FUD and software patents that make people nervous.

Other licenses are becoming more common

[Peter Cooper]

As a semi-open source developer (most of my code is closed, but some is open) I have noticed a big swing away from the GPL in many areas. The Ruby on Rails project is MIT licensed, and most Rails developers who release their code also use the MIT or BSD license.

Major projects like Apache, MySQL, X11, Perl, and PHP eschew the GPL in favor for homebrew alternatives, and while the GPL offers a single license for a disparate range of software.. I agree with ESR, and I believe that licensing of open source software may be better done in a simpler, less arcane way.

Re:Other licenses are becoming more common

[arose]

Having homebrew licenses for every piece of software is "simpler, less arcane?"

Re:Other licenses are becoming more common

[Cronopios]

Major projects like Apache, MySQL, X11, Perl, and PHP eschew the GPL

No sir. Perl and MySQL are GPL'd.

Re:Other licenses are becoming more common

[3dr]

Two wrong posts finally make a right.

Perl is either GPL'd or covered by Wall's Artistic License.

http://dev.perl.org/licenses/

-1 Flamebait

[Lejade]

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.

Re:-1 Flamebait

[joib]

ESR is such a troll.


While I don't consider myself an ESR fan, reading TFA, I got the impression that the one doing the trolling was in fact the interviewer. IMHO his questions are constantly trying to sucker ESR into saying something stupid (more page views => more advertising revenue?), but this time ESR manages to keep his head cool and answers pretty rationally.

Re:-1 Flamebait

[gowen]

Given your sig, I'll take that with a pinch of salt.

ESR once described himself as "one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer", which is so mind-blastingly far from the truth that I've taken nothing he's said seriously since.

Oh for Pete's sake!

[A nonymous Coward]

Can't any of you responders recognize satire when you see it? Are you all so brain dead and numbed out that you have to take everything seriously?

Sheesh.

Re:Oh for Pete's sake!

[llamaluvr]

Your post isn't valid HTML because it did not use the SATIRE tag, or even the now-deprecated SARCASM tag.

Re:Oh for Pete's sake!

[91degrees]

Can't any of you responders recognize satire when you see it?

Of course we can't.

Amazing

[sphealey]

It is amazing how a person can do a small amount of good work (and edit a book based on the contributions of others), which is fine, gain a small amount of fame as a result, which is fine, and then abuse that tiny amount of fame/reputation to make pontificating pronouncements for years afterward, possibly doing a lot of damage to the cause that orignally made him notorious.

sPh

Re:Amazing

[squiggleslash]

In fairness, the guy's been pontificating for years. People who pontificate a lot usually end up being the same types of people who go out and end up leading particular projects, simply because they're the most outspoken. One of the biggest ironies of Open Source is that the movement was inspired, in part, by complaints that Richard M Stallman was "too political." ESR swept in as an anti-Stallman, not anti-Stallman in the sense of being non-political, but in having many opinions that gelled easier with the general libertarian-streak popular amongst the computing community of the time.

I'm not a great fan of ESR. I think the OSI almost passed into irrelevence under his reign (and was staggered after they choose Russ Nelson to succeed him to find out Nelson, at the time at least, was "more of the same, only with even less tact and social skills") While "Open Source" made an impact with the name, the OSI itself seemed to have relatively few successes under its belt, with often the most promoted successors being absurdly controvertial. It's interesting that one of the first messes Nelson and his successors had to deal with, for example, were the number of incompatible licenses.

Why were there incompatible licenses? Because, under ESR's active encouragement, every major business dipping a toe in the water were producing their own customized licenses that usually only minimally furfilled the requirements of the Open Source definition, usually being some form of "copyleft for you, proprietary if we want it for us." This severely damaged the usability of much of the code entering the Free Software world. The worst case were the original APSL (Apple) "Open Source" licenses, which even contained provisions allowing Apple to arbitrarily stop people from distributing APSL licensed code in the future. Only after heavy lobbying from the FSF and a war within the OSI did Apple fix this and other headline issues.

Raymond's saying the GPL isn't necessary now. I can't say I agree. The GPL remains the perfect license for both Open Source and the wider area of Free Software. A company that releases code under it knows any competitor using it will have to contribute any advances they make back. In the real world, where 90% of commercial programming is done in-house to create in-house applications, no license comes closer to meeting corporate requirements. And Raymond's wrong about Linux. The problem with Linux is not that it's protected under the GPL, it's that it hasn't been protected strongly enough - that is, there's not enough enforcement of the GPL when it comes to Linux. There are still frequent attempts to sneak proprietary device drivers into the kernel, for example. This directly hurts free software, because information about how those drivers work becomes unavailable. Users aren't able to fix bugs. Users of other, less famous, free operating systems are unable to create compatible drivers themselves.

One can probably make a whole bunch of ad-hominem comments here about why he isn't supportive about the GPL, but ultimately, it doesn't matter. We're going through problem after problem caused by people thinking they're being "practical" and screwing it up for everyone else. Linus adopts Bitkeeper. X11 users use nVidea drivers. If no-one else will, at least we'll always have the FSF to "get it" if those who like little centralized pockets of meritless power don't.

Re:Amazing

[dwarfking]

Just an aside to one sentence in your well spoken comments:

In the real world, where 90% of commercial programming is done in-house to create in-house applications, no license comes closer to meeting corporate requirements

I used to work for a large multinational retailer that did most of its development in house as you mention for in house applications.

We were under restrictions from legal when using GPL'd code because there was no clear definition of 'distribution'. According to some of the legal review of the GPL, we would have been distributing our code when we made it available to solely owned affiliates of the parent company. They were part of a separate business line with their own IT and executive staff, more a maintenance organization than a retailer (they did not have stores).

As an overall enterprise we were consolidating on common platforms (bulk purchasing power) across the board, but were still separate entities. The legal advisors indicated that our sharing of code with GPL components to these affiliates consituted distribution which would have activated the viral nature.

Whether this is accurate or not IANAL and can not answer. All I know is this very large organization with a large legal staff determined it was a possibility, and therefor restricted us to not use GPL code unless it could be alternately licensed or was supplied as part of a software purchase from a vendor that had the liability.

Re:Amazing

[sajithts]

Say it, bother. You see, I created a slashdot account just to thank you.

Counterpoint

[vondo]

The part of his interview summarized by the post is that he essentially argues that since open source software is so popular now, it can be BSD licensed because no one has the resources to outperform the OS community with their own fork. This is demonstrably false, just look at the KHTML/Apple situation. If they could truly go their own ways without Apple showing anything they did but KDE showing everything, I think it's pretty clear Apple could run ahead of KDE.

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.

Re:Counterpoint

[argent]

just look at the KHTML/Apple situation

Yes, do, because this is a great example of where the GPL doesn't make any difference. Apple effectively forked KHTML (as near as I can tell, accidentally), but it was legal to do so under the GPL... they didn't need to do anything more than release the source code. Instead, in response, they opened up the CVS and the bug database. Not because the GPL forced them to, but because the chose to.

If KHTML had been under the BSDL, would Apple have taken it away completely? Legally, they could have, but they haven't done that for other open source components in Mac OS X... the source trees at opensource.apple.com and opendarwin.org include code under BSDL, APSL, GPL, and more.

AT&T took BSD code and forked it, and nobody cared until USL tried to shut down the open-source BSD... and that BSD code turned out to be just the lever that Berkeley needed to bring USL to heel.

Microsoft's using GPL code and BSD code in Interix, and that has neither let them "outperform" Cygwin nor forced Microsoft to open Interix one skerrick more. Microsoft's been using BSD code in Windows for years, but that same code was re-implemented in Linux... if the code had been GPLed, would Linux somehow be more outperforming BSD in the market, would NT have been less successful? Personally, I wish Microsoft had used more of the BSD stack rather than mostly borrowing userland tools, it would have made socket programming in Windows a lot easier... and more compatible.

So, over and over again, we see that it's not the license that matters, it's the attitude of the people using it.

The GPL doesn't stop you from forking the code base. The GPL doesn't stop different open source groups from forking the code base. The GPL doesn't stop groups using the same code base from developing functionally equivalent packages on top of that GPLed code. Heck, sometimes the only way to bring a code base forward is to fork and switch, and Nokia at least seems to think that's a great idea...

If they could truly go their own ways without Apple showing anything they did but KDE showing everything, I think it's pretty clear Apple could run ahead of KDE.

But instead, Apple is voluntarily choosing to take part on the open market of ideas to a far greater degree than any license commits them to. They could easily pull a Sveasoft and release source code grudgingly enough that KHTML would forever remain the junior fork.

What ESR's saying now is what BSD advocates have been saying for years. Companies that are interested in being productive partners will be productive partners no matter what license you use, and companies that aren't will find ways to stick to the letter of the license while completely gutting its spirit.

Re:Counterpoint

[endofoctober]

"Yes, do, because this is a great example of where the GPL doesn't make any difference."

I think it actually /does/ make a difference, although it's not obvious - the GPL kept Apple from legally sucking up source code and not releasing it per the license. The GPL sets a minimum standard of behavior for companies. The GPL may have started as a way to subvert the system and give the code freedom, but it's evolved into a set of legal protections. That's the point Raymond seems to be missing.

"So, over and over again, we see that it's not the license that matters, it's the attitude of the people using it."

If you're talking about companies who choose to go over and above what the license requires, then sure, I agree with you. But for every company like Apple, there could be a dozen others who take the code and don't give back their source. For those companies, it's the license /and/ the attitude that matter.

I don't think forking is the issue of greatest concern. You're right that companies likely to contribute will do so regardless of license...when they don't, though, at least the license holders have some way of defending themselves in court through the GPL.

Re:Counterpoint

[argent]

the GPL kept Apple from legally sucking up source code and not releasing it per the license

The GPL did no such thing. You can't say "this license or law stopped X, Y, or Z" unless there's a likelihood of X, Y, or Z happening. There's a law against my pulling out a gun and shooting my boss, but you can't say "the law kept me from shooting my boss" unless you had reason to believe that I would have done that if the law didn't stop me.

Yes, there are companies for which this is true. There are, for example, companies that have taken BSDL code and not released their changes. But there are companies that have taken BSDL code and have released their changes. Apple is one of them, and given that they have released the source to their entire kernel and just about every other part of OS X below the GUI and big chunks above it as well, I find it hard to believe that the license KHTML is under would have made much if any difference to what Apple released.

Apple is not just paying lip service to open source. They're making open source part of their business model. Because open source works better for them. And that's what ESR is pointing out here, that companies are seeing that open source works better than going it alone, even if you're Apple. Yes, the license has now and then prevented some bad actors from releasing proprietary versions of open source tools, but it's pretty rare that the resulting code has been more effective than the open source version.

I mean, look at Windows NT. The use of the BSD TCP stack in Windows NT (however much debate there might be over HOW MUCH was used in the kernel, or how much remains, they definitely used BSD code) is the poster boy for how Big Bad Companies use BSDL code and don't give back to the community. Is Microsoft's code superior to the open source version? If you had the choice, would you pick Microsoft's TCP and socket library? There's no question but that Microsoft's TCP implementation is one of the least flexible around and the fact theat their socket library doesn't use file handles is a major shortcoming.

Do you think Microsoft would be better or worse off if they had completely open-sourced their TCP implementation? If it was possible for me to go in and fix stuff, and improve NT's networking? To give it the kind of NATting and packet filtering that BSD and Linux TCP has had for years? To fix the socket library so you could implement a superserver like inetd?

Hell yes, they'd be better off if it was open sourced. No matter HOW big they are, they'd still have a better product.

THAT is the point that ESR's making. That when you're using open source software, the people most hurt by fighting it and only begrudgingly doing what the law allows... are the code hoarders. And THAT is what companies are catching on to.

He is right !

[Anonymous Coward]

Read my comment before marking me "troll" or "flamebait":
Raymond has it right: The Open-Source-Movement does not need the GPL. As he says:

"That is, if we really believe that open source is a superior system of production, and therefore that it will drive out closed source in a free market, then why do we think we need infectious licensing? "

He is an Open-Source Guy. He thinks, that Open-Source is good, because the developement model (that is: the organisation of the programmers) is better.
He does not care about "Freedom" or ethics. The Free-Software Movement cannot live without the GPL, because without the "virulent" nature of it, no Freedom can be taken away.

This interview proves, that RMS was right, when he rejected the term "Open Source" !

Re:He is right !

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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...

Without GPL were doomed!

[MindPrison]

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!

Naive Optimism

[sjbe]

"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.

Re:Naive Optimism

[Twylite]

Corporate management has a fiduciary duty to maximize stakeholder wealth in the long term. Maintaining acceptable profit levels is only one aspect of that goal. Companies that go all-out to maximize return to shareholders find that their business model is unsustainable and they burn out.

Contrary to your assertions regarding short term self interest, most people engage in long term planning and understand the risks of sacrificing long term returns for short term profits. Around the world most public companies now face government regulation or bourse rules for corporate governance, which makes stakeholder wealth (not shareholder profit) their fiduciary duty.

So if a company can sustain a business model by taking and not giving back, it will probably do so. But in most cases it is in the company's interests to give back. For example, it makes economic sense for a company with an embedded Linux platform to contribute fixes back to the original source tree, because it takes more effort to maintain a separate patch tree in-house.

If this were true...

[Limecron]

...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.

Re:If this were true...

[SpinJaunt]

Actually you're quite wrong; if you spent a week looking at as many open source/free software projects source, you would actually see a huge difference in each of the developers motives behind doing what they do, even just peering in to linux's source can give you so much insight as to why.

Now, IBM sometime ago done some adverts making Linux as a so called prodigy, here to re-cap:

IBM is fronting the bill for Linux's TV debut -- the company is advertising Linux as being the key to an "open" future. The ad was directed by Joe Pytka ("created" by Ogilvy & Mather), and debuted in the US on September 7, 2003, during an NFL game and the US Open men's finals.

The ad stars a stonefaced young blond boy, sitting in a nondescript chair in a Matrixesque white expanse, facing another chair in which is seated, over the course of the ad, 13 other people, each elucidating some important topic to the Kid (as well as a soccer player, who juggles a ball). These aren't your average after-school math tutors, either: the guests include Penny Marshall (actor; director), Muhammad Ali (boxer), Sylvia Nasar (author, "A Beautiful Mind"), Henry Lewis Gates (professor, Harvard; African-American community leader) and John Wooden (former coach, the Bruins). The nuggets of wisdom spoken to the Kid:

• "This is a G chord."
  
• "Homo habilis was the first to use tools."
  
• "A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player. Losing yourself for the group for the good of the group -- that's teamwork."
  
• "We've always watched the stars. If you look at the sky, you can see the beginning of time."
  
• "Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom -- but sharing data is the first step toward community."
  
• "Poetry. There's not much glory in poetry. Only achievement."
  
• "One little thing can solve an incredibly complex problem."
  
• "Everything's about timing, Kid."
  
• "This is business -- faster, better, cheaper. Constant improvement."
  
• "So, you wanna fly, huh? Wind speed, thrust; it's physics."
  
• "Res publica non dominetur."
  
• "Plumbing -- it's all about the tools."
  
• "Speak your mind. Don't back down."
  

"Does he have a name?"
"His name is Linux."

As the ad ends, "LINUX" blurs into view, and is then replaced by "THE FUTURE IS OPEN", and finally "IBM" with the URL ibm.com/open underneath it.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=77113

think of the above from a developers point of view, working on Linux.

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.

GPL the bane of my life....

[ChiGodOfKarma]

If I didn't have to check the legality of every Open Source Library and OS feature I would easily use them in my commercial work. I will in no way however do anything which will draw another set of threats. I.E. the OSS community has sent threatening letters to the company I worked for because we linked with libraries considered to be GPL'd forcing us to write wrappers and stop using some of them. Not a very good way to get fan boys. CGoK

Re:GPL the bane of my life....

[gowen]

If I didn't have to check the legality of every Open Source Library and OS feature I would easily use them in my commercial work

Whereas no proprietary library has ever been sold in a shrink-wrap of pure legalese. No sir. Legal constraints are found only in open source...

Sure, George.

Re:GPL the bane of my life....

[m50d]

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.

That's not the problem

[Otter]

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.

Re:That's not the problem

[Otter]

The KHTML case may be a good example. Apple does have the right to use KHTML and incorporate it into their own products, but they do have to play by the rules and obey the license, and the community or the developers are not being unreasonable when they ask for that to happen.

That's precisely the point. There are two sets of "rules" here* -- what the GPL actually requires and what "the community" thinks the rules ought to be. There is no real question that Apple was in full compliance with the licensing terms; that doesn't protect them from a) idiot zealots who think that they're required to backport code to the original base and b) less idiotic zealots who realize that there's no violation but invoke "the spirit of the GPL" anyway.

That's precisely my point -- that obeying the rules is *not* adequate.

* Actually there's a third set of rules consisting of terms asserted by the FSF (like about dynamic linking), the true legal status of which is entirely unclear.

Weather forecast

[Egregius]

I feel a s***storm coming nonetheless. ;-)

Re:Weather forecast

[TheRaven64]

Why did you have to censor `snow'?

Re:Not really.

[amliebsch]

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.

Awww.... the GPL makes you nervous?

[solios]

Use a BSD. Stop whining.

Talent and time are the only things holding FOSS back. :P

superiority of open source

[_|()|\|]

What you have to understand about Eric is his belief that open source is a superior development process. He states:

As far back as 1998, I suspected that allegiance to the GPL is actually evidence that open source developers don't really believe their own story. That is, if we really believe that open source is a superior system of production, and therefore that it will drive out closed source in a free market, then why do we think we need infectious licensing?

In effect, Eric is saying something like: if you're innocent, why do you need a lawyer?

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.

Contributors! Contributors!

[iamacat]

Although I have nothing against proprietary software, I am using GPL for stuff I release for free. This way I can be confident nobody will plagiarize and sell my stuff without even telling their customer where to get the free version. And if someone has more honest code reuse in mind, they can always ask - and compensate me as appropriate.

A lot of people already wrote GPLed software before Linux was released for that and other reasons. I wonder how feature-rich Linux distributions would be if they accepted only BSD-licensed software. Even people who do serious kernel work might want to get paid if someone uses their kick-ass algorithms in a closed-source OS.

kde, gnome, gnu*

[SolusSD]

He forgets to mention all the software that composes a working linux system. Linux as a server/desktop and not just a kernel to plus into someone elses non-gpl'd system would not be where it is today without the gpl. just look at all the shared resources that go into today's open source software.

You miss his main argument

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't claim that people wouldn't do what you describe. He just claims that those acting that way would ultimately hurt themselves.

Now the way he arrives at this conclusion is the interesting part, I think.

His basic argument is that open source developement is a superior system of production.

Now if that is the case, there really is no need for the GPL, as companies who don't participate in this superior system (that is, take open source code and turn it into closed source) are in fact punishing themselves.

I don't know if I really agree with him on that, but it's at least an interesting and thought provoking argument.

Re:Mac too

[Golias]

Mac OS uses a BSD kernel too, right?

Wrong. Close... but still wrong.

OS X uses a Mach microkernel with a BSD compatability layer.

Which, as far as most users are concerned, is pretty much the same as saying "it's BSD," but under the hood that's not exactly true.

I have to disagree

[Todd Knarr]

I have to disagree with Eric. Certainly open-source would be more widely adopted if it didn't use the GPL, but it wouldn't be more successful. A lot of it's success is because of features that've gotten added over time as people needed them. The GPL is what enforces that add-back. Without it individuals would probably contribute back but corporate-sponsered development would've probably been locked up on the grounds of "protecting our precious IP". We would've lost a lot of features, and we would've seen a splintering like we did with Unix itself as companies fought to make their own subtly-incompatible versions of software to insure their customers stayed locked in and buying from them. We saw Microsoft try this with the non-GPL'd Kerberos software, and the only thing that prevented it was MIT getting nasty about trademarks. Without the GPL this would be the norm, not an exceptional example.

Actually ESR misses the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Actually ESR misses the point.

[snorklewacker]

> It's not even the kernel. A few years back, the BSD was superior in many ways, but Linux still outstripped it.

I have one word for you. kswapd

Pick a BSD, any one. Their virtual memory subsystem far outstrips the unstable mess that Linux's has been since at least 1998. VM ain't just swap, it's virtually every every single memory access you make in protected mode. And Linux, across kernel versions and distributions, has consistently made a dogs breakfast of it.

I am dealing with the kswapd issues on three different machines running three different distros, some with 2.4, some with 2.6, some with RHEL (which is practically a version unto its own). I am sick to death of it. If I had any say in the matter, I'd be running FreeBSD.

Re:Actually ESR misses the point.

[Lukey Boy]

Companies would rather use other peoples BSD licensed code. Companies would not like that license for their own code, because then competitors could use their code with no restrictions.

Re:Actually ESR misses the point.

[Tony Hoyle]

When companies like TT or IBM GPL (or Digium, MySql, etc.) a product they also refuse to make changes without you assigning copyright to the parent company. This allows them to charge for the product including all the user contributions.. it's an interesting business model.. efectively using the GPL against itself (using it to stop a program being 'free' by tying it to a single company with commercial licensing terms).

the political argument vs. what the consumer wants

[aCapitalist]

The GPL is so politcally tainted that it just turns so many people off. And at the end of the day, the consumer doesn't give a damn if Microsoft or Apple or whoever "steals" code that has a liberal license. They just want good software.

If you're a developer, then you have every right to choose any license you want, but it always seems that we have non-developers trying to tell people what is "freedom".

How many BSD developers are bitter that Apple co-opted their code (which remains open anyway) and are making money off it? Probably none. It's a gift an they're most likely proud that their code is in a kickass operating system.

But it's always the GPL zealots that think they have some right to tell BSD developers or people that give out code under a liberal license like BSD/MIT/X11 that they're not doing the right thing because it can be "closed up".

And that's always the big lie that GPL zealots throw out. That code can be "closed up". Nobody buys it, because everybody knows that unless all the source code from all the hard drives disappears then that's impossible. But they continue to lie to promote their political agenda and turn people off.

IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Linspire, Xandros?

[Bob9113]

Does ESR sincerely believe that IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Linspire, and Xandros would be feeding their enhancements back if it weren't for the GPL? Those are very pragmatic companies; they use Linux because they believe there is a competitive advantage to be had by doing so. If not for the GPL, they would be releasing proprietary extensions of Linux. Could the altruist community have brought Linux to where it is today in the same short time without the help of those companies? The GPL has done exactly what it was meant to do; "Here's a cool party. If you don't want to come, that's OK. If you do, it's potluck - you don't have to bring a dish if you can't cook, but you can't just take some food and leave."

Or, in other words

[mcc]

"Guy who has been trying to deemphasize the FSF within the open source movement for over a decade now trying to deemphasize the FSF.."

The GPL has become the most popular free software license because it enforces a contract where you can't take without giving back. This may not be what you want for some programs, particularly programs which are platforms, such as Apache or Perl. But for most cases it is. It sends an important message to the people contributing to a GPLed project-- it says, your contributions won't be wasted, if people use this you benefit. It gives you a reason to contribute rather than boredom of philanthropy.

Meanwhile the only people who would be made "nervous" by the presence of the GPL are the people who want, or think they might want in the future, to take from open source software without giving equally in return. Think about that for a moment.

I tend to release my personal code under the LGPL because I feel the GPL is too restrictive, and I care more about the things I release being useful than I care about knowing I'll get something back. But that doesn't mean I'm going to deny how important the GPL is. The GPL made the open source development model as we know it today, with corporate and private interests sharing resources toward a common goal, possible-- we may be at a point now where lots of companies are contributing to open source purely voluntarily, but this is at least partly because open source is "hip" right now. There was a point in the past where it wasn't "hip" and companies sometimes had to be made to contribute, by holding the "you have to contribute to take" aspect of the GPL heads. There will be a point in the future where open source is not "hip" the way it is today. When that point comes, good luck convincing companies to contribute to your Apache licensed projects rather than just taking. It won't work all the time.

Picking the right license for the job

[cowbutt]

As far as I can see, there is a need for a minimal set of about four Free software licenses:

BSD-like for code that either isn't terribly interesting or important enough to care about it being embraced and extended or code that represents a canonical implementation of a proposed standard that it is hoped will be widely adopted. Yes, even by Microsoft.

GPL-like for interesting and unique code that presents a "Unique Selling Point" for Free-as-in-speech software. Organisations that want use it to reduce development costs and to later redistribute products need to accept the author's terms, or get off their arse and develop their own equivalent code.

LGPL-like for code that would, if it weren't for its intended usage, be otherwise licensed as GPL-like above, but it's better if it's widely used. Yes, even by proprietary applications.

MPL-like for 'donated' code for which the original author wishes to reserve rights for themselves that they don't necessarily wish to grant to others. Their code, their right to choose. If you don't like it, play somewhere else.

None of what I've written above is original, even rms has said similar things in the past.

Conceivably, I can accept (and even hope for) the theoretical possibility that the time will come when everyone accepts that Free software is here to stay and that no-one wishes to try to selfishly exploit it. Just like the possibility that one day humans will learn to treat each other with respect and consequently, police forces, weapons, property rights and even laws are no longer necessary to deter unwanted exploitation. Sadly, that day is not yet here. And that's where I disagree with esr.

Take a tip from the IETF

[Medievalist]

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.

I keep forgetting

[SimianOverlord]

Is ESR the fat one with the beard, or the moustachied one with the flute? I wish submitters would remind us in write up - I'm thinking brackets after the name "ESR (moustache / flute)" would help remind us each time. To many TLAs in Open Sauce.

Re:I keep forgetting

[-brazil-]

ESR is the mustache guy, I think. Unfortunately your criteria aren't all that helpful either, since there is more than one very bearded poster child of the open source movement.

Re:I keep forgetting

[2names]

I'm thinking brackets after the name

Better get everyone to agree on that standard before you publish it. Otherwise you'll have MS people putting curly braces, Linux people putting brackets, and Mac people using Floating Hearts or something...

*ducks*

Re:I keep forgetting

[peterpi]

And as such should really be referred to as GUN/ESR, not just ESR.

Not just "improvements".

[khasim]

Microsoft's favorite tactics are "embrace, extend, extinguish".

This is far more difficult if you have have release the code for that "extend" under the same license that you got the original code.

If everyone can implement those same extensions, under the same license, then "extinguish" becomes far more difficult.

human nature unchecked

[burnin1965]

The answer to whether or not we still need the gpl:

http://gpl-violations.org/http://gpl-violations.or g/

Nothing more should need saying, but I've got a couple more minutes. ;)

I'm sure at some point the use of open source software will be so ubiquitous as to make the result of hording, thieving, and conspiring by individuals and corporations ineffectual.

However, I still believe that we have not reached that cross roads yet. There are still a number of people and corporations who have the desire and the ability to plunder the hard work of those who produce the code and then conspire to both denegrate the open source offerings while profiting from that same well.

I like to call these entities the Robber Barons of the Information Age. They are filled with childish and immature emotions and characteristics. They see themselves as icons of a vast empire they built and they are justfied in their actions. Of course the truth is that no one man or even the entire clique of Robber Barons created the information age. In fact it has been the nameless and faceless masses of electronic/software engineers in the background producing all the fantastic hardware and software which makes the information age possible. These men who are supposed to be leaders instead have become filled with themselves. And it all comes down to human nature and the corruption of power.

The way I see it the GPL and the idea behind it is a tool that can be used to take back what has been stolen by the Robber Barons. Many of these same nameless masses who made the Barons are also producing open source code under the GPL and the GPL is poison to the thieving Barons, that is why they despise it to no end.

The GPL is a tool to help keep the Robber Barons human nature in check. I think the end result is that instead of having icons in the open source development circles there are leaders.

Anyhow, thats enough ranting for now.

burnin

p.s. Just a note on the mention of engineering. Not having a degree in engineering does not mean you are not an engineer and conversely having a degree in engineering does not make you an engineer. If you really want to know what an engineer is and determin if you are an engineer just look up the definition of engineer and engineering.

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eric should know better, is he in need of attention again?

If he honestly doesn't believe that the GPL has helped get Linux and all of the tools it needs to where it's at, he's a fool. We're still regularly finding people that aren't following it.

The reality is that we're entering the post-secret code world. The license doesn't matter so much, people want source code from Sun, IBM, even Microsoft because it makes their investment more secure. It's only the fringes that really care about the licenses that much. There are some opponenets to the movement who will bitch about the GPL (Sun, MS..) but it's simply reaching a point where that doesn't matter too much, nobody who is honest about business really cares to steal someone else's code. Nobody who is really serious thinks that they can get away with it. It's really about being able to maintain your investment and possibly customize.

Eric, you should spend your energy debunking the GPL detractors rather than spreading their FUD. It's really pretty simple, if you want to keep your code secret, then write it yourself and do that. If you want to play with others then be willing to share with others. If you're making a project that is primarily GPLed code, then maybe you should think about it before you try to call it your own stuff and keep the code secret, you really don't have much of a competitive edge in the first place.

Here's what I want in a license

[suitepotato]

From the point of view of using open code:
The ability to use open code in a non open product with no more than three provisions: first that I only have to republish the open code used whether or not I changed it and if so with the changes notes, second that any code strictly written by me remain mine to do with as I please and be under no compulsion to open it or relinquish my rights to it in any way, and third to pay such royalties as are required to whoever is assigned their receipt should I charge for the resulting product.

From the point of view of creating open code:
A license model with various clauses that allows me to either open my code completely or partially, and grant certain rights to users to either use it for free or be able to charge for derivative works and require or not as I see fit disclosure of the code used and any changes made.

The whole cliche IANAL thing holds great meaning here in that I am NOT a lawyer but a techie. I don't want to become a lawyer or even a paralegal and the licenses out there damn near require me to start becoming one. Given that, I might as well retain a lawyer to write licenses based on my desires on demand. Since I live in a court town with more laywers per square mile than manhole covers and potholes, it's not that difficult to find them.

Industry needs to be able to charge for the fruits of their labors and would likely have not a lot of problem paying royalties to open source organizations. Such monies would undoubtedly go far in attracting full time core developers and keepers in a way that PayPal donations just can't touch.

Imagine if Microsoft was embraced instead by the open source world, if the open source world worked WITH Microsoft, instead of constantly against them. With more flexible and sane license structures and an end to eschewing commerce and capitalism on the open source side, more of the outside world's work might then find its way into Microsoft products where they could then say, "we're responsible for that" and "we changed that structure and made it more secure". And a lot of Microsoft's work might under the right license terms make it back to the open source world for inclusion into other OSes and so forth.

Just a little dream I have that someday people will grow up and learn you cannot change the course of a stampede by standing before it and yelling epithets and waving slogans, but must join the stampede, run the race to the fore, and lead it from within. Windows' entrenchment is that stampede and open source is the idiot sitting before it on the ground thinking he can wave off the charging cattle.

A consultant's perspective

[gwalcharian]

I've worked with clients ranging in size from Mom and Pop businesses to fortune 500s as a developer and system integrator. The bigger the client usually means the more recognition of the value of Intellectual Capital, and the pressure to protect that capital.

For large clients Open Source can be a tough sell, though it is getting easier, thanks in large part to Apache Server and Firefox projects (Guys and Gals, you rock!). GPL Open Source is a no go with every mid to large size client I've worked for in most cases. In many cases LGPL was also no go.

The secondary reason? The viral nature of the GPL.

What? The secondary reason!? Yep. The primary reason is the rabid fanaticism with which the GPL is worshipped/defended by many (NOTE: NOT all, there are many bright and reasonable folk in the GPL camp).

Case in point: I know a project that was using a vanilla MySQL instantiation and connecting to it via MySQL's Java drivers. They were unable to use a GPL license, but thought they didn't have to as they were just using the JDBC drivers. They were quickly and I am told emphatically informed that their entire project was GPL if they distributed it. The project was rewritten to use Oracle, and a no Open Source policy was instituted.

The moral: Open Source got killed in that project, and many others, because of the fanaticism of the GPL crowd and because of the all-encompassing nature of the GPL.

Fanatics of any stripe are bad. Rabid fanatics are worse.

IMHO the perfect model for an money-making Open Source licensing scheme would be similar to Saxon's: Make a functional product, release it under a BSD style license (no idea what Michael's license is, but I believe not GPL), and then create another tier of product available for sale with features that are very desirable (Namespace support). Supplement that with consulting and you have a decent business model, if your products and skills are good.

As a song said, "Free your mind, and the rest will follow..."

Re:A consultant's perspective

[heck]

Case in point: I know a project that was using a vanilla MySQL instantiation and connecting to it via MySQL's Java drivers. They were unable to use a GPL license, but thought they didn't have to as they were just using the JDBC drivers. They were quickly and I am told emphatically informed that their entire project was GPL if they distributed it.

I want to first emphatically state (for those who are clueless) that whoever told this company that they had to GPL their entire project was a fuckwit.

You are allowed to use a GPL'd Java driver in your proprietary software as long as:

• if you make any changes to the driver, you release those changes back, per GPL requirements
• you do not sell the driver to the end user (including a blurb that you are using this GPLd driver blah blah would be recommended)

And now I wander into the tangent of "what the hell were the programmers doing?". The idea I try to live by is that I don't give a flying fucking shit what the database and drivers are. I create a table structure and an automated way to create those tables in a SQL database; I create code that goes against a JNDI data source; and I test against SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. Maybe DB2. Unless it is required that you do a lot of things SQL side (such as triggers on the database side), the idea is you abstract out the database dependencies and let the customer choose what database they want to support (and so what drivers they need to use). But that's just another consultant's perspective.

Re:A consultant's perspective

[khallow]

Case in point: I know a project that was using a vanilla MySQL instantiation and connecting to it via MySQL's Java drivers. They were unable to use a GPL license, but thought they didn't have to as they were just using the JDBC drivers. They were quickly and I am told emphatically informed that their entire project was GPL if they distributed it. The project was rewritten to use Oracle, and a no Open Source policy was instituted.

I'm missing important information about the situation above, but here's my take. What's neglected here is that the JDBC drivers in question are issued under a dual license (commercial/GPL). So this sounds like a straight-forward decision not to purchase the commercial license. They could have connected to the MySQL database using say, Sun's JDBC stuff without having to GPL their code. The "No Open Source" policy is just stupid, but it's not my company.

Re:A consultant's perspective

[adtifyj]

So, instead of talking to the nice folks at mysql.com (the business), they hit the mailing lists looking for legal consultation on licensing issues with the expected results, and in the end decided to talk to the nice folks at Oracle and rewrite the project?

My guess is they wanted to go with Oracle anyway, otherwise they would have invested the legal and project management time required to keep using the existing project codebase.

Re:A consultant's perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: I know a project that was using a vanilla MySQL instantiation and connecting to it via MySQL's Java drivers. They were unable to use a GPL license, but thought they didn't have to as they were just using the JDBC drivers. They were quickly and I am told emphatically informed that their entire project was GPL if they distributed it. The project was rewritten to use Oracle, and a no Open Source policy was instituted.

The moral: Open Source got killed in that project, and many others, because of the fanaticism of the GPL crowd and because of the all-encompassing nature of the GPL.

I Call BS. The official MySQL JDBC drivers are GPL, but you can purchase them under a different licence for commercial use. Plus, there are 3 LGPL licenced JDBC drivers for MySQL that I know of, that you would not have to pay for OR release your code as GPL to use.

There is no way a company looked at the cost of licensing the MySQL JDBC drivers, and then decided on cost alone to go with Oracle! Oracle costs lots of money (and is arguably worth it) and MySQL licensing is peanuts next to that cost.

Not another GPL/BSD flamefest

[IGnatius T Foobar]

This is stupid. Both the GPL and BSD licenses are open source. They're both valid approaches. One prevents proprietary forks from coming into existence, the other doesn't. Which license you choose depends solely on whether you, as a developer or software publisher, are ok with that. That's all. Nothing else.

Ugh... no

[mcc]

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!

Re:Ugh... no

[argent]

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.

Come on, ESR is a bullshit artist

[melted]

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.

We Don't Need the ESR Anymore

[HawkingMattress]

Oh wait, we never needed him, only him thought so.
This guy has 0% credibility from my point of vue, just like any stoopid politician who tries to push his agenda while telling you he's defending your freedom or whatever...
Get a job, and stop annoying us.

Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud

[team99parody]

Parent wrote: "That's a ridiculous argument."

This whole thread is rediculous.

The OSI (open source initiative - a california nonprofit org, funded largely by industry) & members including ESR
has always been at odds with
the FSF (Free Software Foundation - a massachusetts nonprofit organization, funded & staffed largely by academia) & members including RMS regarding free/open software. Each compete for donations, developers, mindshare, etc just like any other two organizations.

Please take anything the OSI says about the GPL, and anything the FSF says about the CDDL with a large grain of salt rubbed in the wound.

(opinionated rant: To ESR and the rest of the OSI - I don't give a damn how much Sun paid you from their Microsoft settlement to get the pattent-encumbered CDDL approved, please stop bashing the FSF and trying to divide and conquor the F/OSS community)

Re:Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud

[Usquebaugh]

Easier to sum up :-

OSI = West Coast
FSF = East Coast

Re:Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud

[Anonymous Coward]

ridiculous, dammit! Deserving of ridicule. What the fuck is "redicule"? You had just fucking quoted it from the GP! How the fuck do you get it wrong?!?

Re:Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud

[tolkienfan]

Parent +5 Insightful

ESR has claimed in the past that Open Source differs from Free Software in it's rhetoric.

This is clearly bunk.

The reason ESR is now bitching about the GPL now is obviously that he's noticed the GPL is more than a license. It's RMSs creed.
ESR has observed the recent publicity about the GPL3 and realized that some of the principals the GPL stands for are ones he does not share.

If he thinks Open Source would succeed faster without the GPL, I think RMS would probably happily agree!

The GPL is not there to promote Open Source. It's there to protect Free Software.

If he wants to drive a stake into an already divided community, he's succeeding.
But he needs to wake up and realize that he's hurting the whole industry by doing it.

Just at the point when the GPL has gained traction in some of the biggest corporations in the industry, ESR comes out and slams it; inviting people to create their own licenses.

There are already far too many incompatible Free and Open Source Software licenses.

The last thing we need is someone trashing the license with the biggest share.
What we do need is the ability to mix and match source code from all over. To take ideas a freely mix them with existing code and make something new.
We need fewer licenses.

While I thoroughly respect ESR and some of what he has done, this is a very bad move.

He's sending the message that it just fine to drop the principals of freedom for accelerated growth or wider acceptance.

While it's clear he and some others believe it, he does not speak for us all; and should shut the hell up.

The GPL is the pillar that Free Software has stood upon. It has withstood all attacks from the largest and meanest enemies.
If it's defeated and Free Software goes away, Open Source will shortly thereafter follow.

BSD is a great example of what doesn't work

[jimfrost]

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.

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.

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

[demachina]

Great post. Exactly right.

You ditch the GPL and Linux will fragment just like UNIX did. Companies like HP, IBM, Novell and the now Wall Street obsessed Red Hat would start doing all their work on proprietary branches in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage and "differentiate" their product which is exactly what all the proprietary Unix flavors did. "Differentiation" was the death knell for proprietary UNIX. They are all dead and dieing due to the fragmentation of resources and applications, while Linux is going strong.

Maybe we don't need ESR any more. Some of his lunatic rants make people nervous about using open source.

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

[greggman]

First of all your flat out wrong, lots of companies have contributed to FreeBSD.

Secondly that's only one example. There are plenty of other succesful BSDed open source projects

Apache
Python
PHP
Boost
Subversion
Lua
XFr ee
libpng
libtiff
libjpeg

the point is that BSD works just fine. you don't need to try to force people to contribute. In fact, the whole point of ESR argument is that most companies don't like the viral nature of GPL so they'd perfer not to contribute at all but given a BSDed project they can contribute directly to that project and not worry about having to give up everything else they use it with. Everybody wins.

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

[jimfrost]

the whole point of ESR argument is that most companies don't like the viral nature of GPL so they'd perfer not to contribute at all but given a BSDed project they can contribute directly to that project and not worry about having to give up everything else they use it with. Everybody wins.

I'm well aware of his point, it has been made ad-infinitum over the last two decades. I've been in the middle of commercial products that had to deal with both licenses and, for sure, it's easier to deal with BSD than the twisty legalisms of the GPL.

I don't think anyone argues that the BSD license isn't preferable to businesses over GPL. And why would it not be? They literally get something for nothing. Everyone likes to get something for nothing!

The thing is, at some point the value of the codebase is greater than the cost of giving up some of your rights in order to use it. When that happens then the GPL has a major, major advantage in that it creates a feedback loop. The more code gets donated the more incentive there is to use it and as a result donate more code and make the code base more valuable.

Back ten years ago you could have argued that that loop wouldn't happen because of the unwillingness of people to give up their rights, and it would not have been possible to point to counterexamples. But Linux proves that there is a point at which the value overcomes the resistance.

No BSD-licensed product has ever had that happen, nor does it seem likely that it ever will happen -- there is no incentive whatsoever to feed code back, and plenty of counter-incentive.

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? ;)

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

[dkgasaway]

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.

You seem to make the assumption that these same evil corporations that forked BSD would also fork and contribute to the same software if GPL-licensed. Suppose BSD was released under a copyleft license. Would they have used BSD and released changes back to the community? Or would they have simply not used BSD at all and instead created their own OS or licensed one from elsewhere? Before you answer that question, carefully consider the software climate at the time, where free and open software was a new idea. Contrast that with the climate today, where the these ideas are established, and Linux is a top player in the field. Perhaps *that* is why Linux receives so much corporate support today, not necessarily because of the GPL license.

Ask yourself this question as well: if it were not for the proliferation of UNIX softwares (as a result of the BSD forks), would Mr. Torvalds have created Linux?

You list a number of corporations that distributed BSD-forked software without contribution. I would love to do the same for GPL software, but unfortunately, that is a difficult proposition. In the copyleft world, the equivalent scenario would be a corporation that - given the choice of contributing to a software or avoiding the software completely - chose to avoid the software completely. I don't have the luxury of a list publicly produced products to point to. Certainly, though, there are many corporations that did not contribute to copyleft software *because* it was copyleft software.

-dkgasaway

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

[demachina]

"So why aren't HP, IBM, Novell and Wall Street now making proprietary branches of FreeBSD instead?"

If you know how execs and marketeers think, if the opportunity exists to develop proprietary features for Linux that would "differentiate" their product and help them justify selling their flavor for more, and drive sales of their product over their competitors, they will. On Linux all the engineers and lawyers just say, sorry dude you can't make it proprietary becuase its GPL .... THWACK .... the marketing guy is cut off at the knees before he can spawn fragmentation and proprietariness.

You would hope companies like HP and IBM learned from their mistakes fragmenting UNIX. While they were busy differentiating, Windows was busy unifying their market and burying UNIX.

The GPL is an important insurance policy to keep companies honest and from backsliding to their old proprietary ways.

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

[Mornelithe]

When will Linux use sysctl() instead of /proc?

Doesn't it already? "A sysctl call has been present in Linux since version 1.3.57." However, Linux also lets you use the /proc/sys filesystem to do the same thing, so that I can write 'echo 0 > /proc/sys/foo' rather than writing a program. Is that a big problem for you?

How about virtual channels on a sound card?

ALSA has a method for doing that (the dmix plugin). However, it's not enabled by default, because for cards that actually have multiple channels, it's better to use the real ones.

Maybe, you are thinking about the Linux community?

No, I don't think he was. Seems like you both are mildly ignorant of the other camp (or were you purposely asking about thing that are actually in Linux? In that case, I apologize for being thick).

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

[nxtw]

FreeBSD has working SMP support. A few things are still under the GIANT lock, but most are esoteric devices.

Working, but not great. And the threading support is weak.

Journaling is currently being added.

Which makes it irrelevant right now. Until it's been released and proven to be stable and reliable, I don't see any widespread usage of it. (Plus, with FreeBSD 5's less the spectacular record of working well, I wouldn't consider a new FreeBSD filesystem for quite some time.)

USB support existed in the BSD's--I believe NetBSD had it first--about two years before Linux.

This feature isn't too useful outside of desktop/workstation usage, so most corporations won't be too terribly interested. Furthermore, USB support does exist in both operating systems now.

Jails have existed in FreeBSD for quite some time.

This is something that is missing in Linux. However, its usefulness is limited; When will Linux support Soft Updates?

Linux as a whole never will. Soft updates are a feature of individual file systems, of which Linux supports many. Soft updates and journaling file systems are mutually exclusive, and given the success of journaling file systems, I don't see them coming to Linux any time soon.

When will Linux use sysctl() instead of /proc?

Many years ago?
But even better: when will this make a huge difference in how either operating system works or in functionality?

How about virtual channels on a sound card?

Only a major concern for desktop users. Just about every sound card nowadays has hardware mixing; why not use that instead of your kernel-level (still software, not hardware!) mixer?

Many of the features you have listed are of no interest to many corporations, unless they are in the business of proving desktop operating system solutions.

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

[demachina]

Uh, no the fears are TOTALLY founded and the GPL is the thing thats stopped it so far. The danger doesn't really go back 20 years. Nobody corprate cared about Linux until like 5 or 10 years ago. Now they do. As soon as you put a BSD license on Linux some company will fork it and "differentiate" it. If someone big does it like HP, IBM, Novell or Red Hat there will be doom in the air.

BSD is failing because its been massively differentiated, its so fragmented it has no critical mass. Why it fragmented is hard to say but the license is a leading candidate. Linux doesn't really need to risk following in their footsteps if the license lead to its niche status.

The Linux desktop is failing because its been fragmented especially between GTK and Qt, Gnome and KDE, and in audio API's. Most users don't want a differentiated OS. They want lots of apps that do what they want and they can count on to work. Differentiation in apps good, in OS bad.

"Open Source" is not for software freedom.

[jbn-o]

And it's our responsibility to be good to corporations, even to the point of allowing them to take works out of the commons, because why? The corporations that complain the most about the GNU GPL (Apple and Microsoft, among others) are those that treat their users horribly by distributing programs the users aren't allowed to inspect, share, or modify. The progress the free software movement made before the open source movement existed (which was over a decade of work) happened largely without the direct input of proprietors like what ESR is talking about. The GPL was never anti-business. And yet even after the open source movement continues to try to reframe the debate away from software freedom, the GNU GPL is the most popular free software license in existance.

I think ESR doesn't like the GPL because it works against the open source movement's goal to work for business by introducing them to programmers who are willing to work without payment (cheap labor has been a rallying cry of business, and a source of genuine social discontent amongst workers, for a very long time). The open source movement was founded and continues to do what they can to dismiss software freedom. Software freedom gives people the idea that they don't need the beneficiaries of "open source" as much as they need communities of partners, both individual and organizational. But open source advocates don't see this. They want to pretend that the free software movement and open source movement share a common philosophy despite that never having been the case.

ESR is showing off his ahistorical silliness again. But more importantly, he is trying to reframe the issues away from software freedom as a value unto itself and toward "openness" and innovation. From the very first lines of the article, and his speech, he wants his organization (the Open Source Initiative and, to a larger degree, the open source movement) to get credit for work he had nothing to do with writing -- the GNU GPL. The GPL predates anything to do with "open source" and therefore existed independant of it. Neither the OSI nor ESR have yet to write a single license which can compare to the licenses the Free Software Foundation have written. When it comes to advice about the GPL, consult with experts: Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, and Brad Kuhn, FSF members all. Leave those who want to either "steal thunder" (as the saying goes) aside.

adoption vs. survival

[a137035]

The purpose of the GPL is not to help with the adoption of a piece of software, it is to ensure its long-term survival as an open source project.

The GPL gives people the additional push they need to turn good intentions ("we're going to start using this piece of open source software") into actual actions ("we are going to release our improvements to it"). It also provides crucially important protections against patent abuses.

Anybody who thinks the GPL doesn't have teeth is welcome to try to test it. So far, just about every company who has faced the issue has backed down.

My conclusion:

[labradore]

The GPL helped Linux get started in big ways. It was almost as important as Linus' "leadership." Now that the community is established, we don't need ESR anymore. Er, did we ever?

Exactly.

[jd]

WindRiver is about the only reasonably mainstream corporation to invest in BSD and put stuff back - most other investors who have done so have been in academia.

However, it is notable that WindRiver dropped BSD in favour of Linux, which may be because other companies have to be on a level playing field in that realm.

I don't believe one license is necessarily better than the other - OpenBSD probably couldn't have the level of assurance it does under the GPL, as it would be too mutable. On the other hand, I cannot believe Linux could be as feature-complete if it were under the BSD license.

Where mutable code is beneficial, I believe the GPL and LGPL are absolutely ideal, as they promote very rapid growth and evolution. The BSD license is better when growth and change are much slower, where exchanges of code are much more controlled and formal.

Don't use chainsaws on nails, don't use hammers to cut logs.

Linux popularity isn't from the GPL.

[Some Random Username]

Linux got a headstart in marketshare because of the AT&T lawsuit. The BSDs always had fewer people because of that. Linux hit a critical mass sooner, and became a buzzword for marketing dorks. The money spent marketing linux just made this gap bigger. There's no reason IBM wouldn't have done the same thing to FreeBSD they did with linux, had FreeBSD been the buzzword du jour. IBM was smart and decided to ride the hype, and help push it more. They will do it again for the next buzzword, regardless of license.

Kind of moot, isn't it?

[DunbarTheInept]

Leaving aside the question of whether or not the GPL is good, isn't this a pointless moot thing anyway given that extricating Linux out of GPL and putting it into something else isn't possible anymore?

Firstly there's the problem with all the little itty bitty utility programs that are GPLed that while technically not part of linux since linux is just the kernel, are still rather necessary for a distro of Linux to behave like a Unix - things like "grep" and "cat" and "bash" and so on. To un-GPL a distro of linux would require finding replacements from the ground-up for all of those tools. Secondly, the kernel itself is GPL'ed anyway, with masses of developers adding their own code into it under the understanding that it is GPL. To legally produce a new version of the the kernel at this point under a different license would require either the express consent of ALL THOSE DEVELOPERS WHO EVER ADDED A LINE OF CODE to the kernel, or a way to cut out just those bits contributed by the developers who refuse to put their code under a different license, and then replace them with something that isn't just an exact copy of the same code. There's just no way that is going to be practical. That's just not going to happen. And even then you'd be leaving behind the GPL version of the kernel that I'm sure would grow on its own and become its own fork of the kernel.

So in other words, the whole debate is moot. Like it or not, Linux is GPL to stay.

Human Nature, GPL and Bit Torrent.

[guidryp]

And make that corporate behavior as well.

Linux is successful because of GPL. GPL is an incentive to share, you know that your sharing will result in more sharing. You know that when you contribute to GPL, you are encouraging more people to do the same. In the end you benefit as well.

There is a strong analogy with Bit Torrent. Same human nature factors. Bit Torrent works so well because of enforced sharing.

The alternative is what? The "honor system". Well that really doesn't work if you understand human nature.

The "honor system" completely opposite to the way corporations "MUST" act. Must in that if they can take it for free and give nothing back, then then must to maximize profits as they are obligated to do. GPL frees corporations of the necessity to not give anything back. There now is a case for sharing that is compatible with corporate governance.

GPL is a necessity.

Totally wrong

[drwho]

ESR is way off base on this one. I think that the GPL is the inherent reason why Linux has received a lot of work, even while BSD existed and was for several years more 'mature' code. The Linux kernel, and the other programs that work with it, present a 'deal' to many for-profit entities in that while they may prefer to keep the changes they write to Linux closed, they want to use the changes that others have made, so they are forced to release the changes they make. This has a really amazing value in total.

For instance, look at what happens in embedded systems: There's not a lot of action in the BSD embedded systems because there is the ability to keep changes proprietary. The wheel is constantly re-invented, and therefore the development costs of BSD based embedded systems is higher. While vendors may grumble and moan and sometimes break the GPL by not releasing code, the fact that much of the work IS available because it is forced to be so, is relevant.

This sounds like I am anti-BSD, but I am not. They are both reasonable solutions to the problem of free software. Both have resulted in quality systems. But to say that Linux doesn't need the GPL is absurd.

Why the GPL is important

[jmorris42]

> If your intent is to share, why purposely step on the toes of someone
> who may want to take you up on the offer?

If you want the poster child for the importance of the GPL, I nominate Cisco Systems/Linksys. Every time ESR says teh GPL isn't important somebody in the audience needs to hold up a WRT54G and wave it around. Linksys only released the source because of the GPL, and to be honest, the first release was half hearted. But now a whole community exists around modifying the firmware, which just has to be driving sales in a visible way. So now we get a tarball with EVERYTHING, including the mips toolchain, ready to go. The only part still missing is the network drivers and those belong to Broadcom.