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Open Source Growing At an Exponential Rate
sipmeister writes "Two computer scientists who work for enterprise software giant SAP have shown that open source is growing at an exponential rate. Not only is the code base growing exponentially, but also the number of viable projects. Researchers Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle analyzed the database of open source startup ohloh.net and looked at the last 16 years of growth in open source. They consistently got the best fit for the data using an exponential model. Relating this to open source market revenue, Desphande and Riehle conclude that open source is eating into closed source at a non-trivial pace."
Stop whining already and write your own versions of everything from scratch or using a BSD-alike license. It's not evil for someone who writes software to tell you you can't blatantly rip off their work.
Commercial libraries often are far more "viral". They often have per-copy royalties. They often say you can't reveal the source of any part of your application using the library to a third party, for fear their API will get out and be cloned. People who have licensed commercial libraries and source code to build a project often have a hard time opening the source either BSD or GPL later. In some cases, they even have trouble contributing to a competing open-source project ( see SCO vs. IBM ).
If you want a good virus analogy, how about the BSD raiders? Those people who take and take from BSD or similarly licensed software for closed-source projects (often shrink-wrapped products on which they make a killing) without ever giving a line of code back are very much like a virus. They go around producing more closed-source software. When they find a piece of open-sourced software they can commandeer for their own purposes, they do so. Then they go on to make more closed-source software using what was meant to be open-source software. A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?
The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL. Some BSD code might be included in a GPL project, and the changes to that might be called GPL, but that's bad form on the part of the people doing that. The proper way to borrow BSD code for a GPL project is to modularize BSD code and contribute the changes needed to make the module back to the BSD community, then connect to that module from your GPL code in a different source file.
In the case of writing a new application around a bit of GPL, nobody's forcing you to use that GPled code as a starting point. If you're taking advantage of that code, the law (not just RMS) says you're (probably) making a derivative work. In court, a judge might make decisions about scope and size. If you're not a judge or at least a damn good lawyer, it's not really smart to gamble on that. If you write a clone from documentation, then it's not derivative (but don't steal the documentation against its license -- you might have to write your own without quoting directly).
I write software for a living. Some of my original stuff has a proprietary license. Some of my original stuff is BSD or public domain. Some is GPL. I use a lot of GPL code in some situations and I have no issue passing the code on to customers. My customers aren't generally other programmers, but I figure if they can find me and hire me, then they can find and hire another programmer in the future. That's freedom for the end user, because if I sell the customer a closed-source, proprietary application then their new programmer can't do anything with it. I often contribute back to the central project maintainers. In all, the work that the GPL has saved me has far outweighed the work I've invested in my return contributions. I don't consider that a bad deal.