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A Year of GPLv3
javipas writes "GPLv3 and LGPLv3 were released one year ago, on 29 June 2007. Palamida, who tracks Open Source projects, has made a study of the current situation of these licenses along with AGPLv3, which was released later, in November. The number of projects that have made the transition to these licenses has grown over the last months, and it seems than AGPLv3 has captured a great interest lately. Black Duck Software, a company that tracks Open Source projects too, has made its own study with similar results, and although GPLv3 and its variants have a good adoption rate, the interviews published on the Palamida site (Stallman, Chris Di Bona) show that the acceptance of GPLv3 has still a long way to walk."
No it doesn't, it prevents you from creating hardware which will only run approved binaries and distributing approved free software binaries for it.
Being able to improve the software doesn't mean shit if you can't run your improved version in a useful way.
I wish to remain anomalous
I'd guess that the primary effect is notification of whose code it is, since the copyright notice has to be included in the code or documentation. It probably also provides better protection against someone else claiming copyright on it, since in the public domain case there is no real copyright holder to sue them and make them stop.
You might want to look at what happened to the Java Model Railroad Interface project. They used a permissive licence, only to find that someone else got a patent (of dubious validity, but nonetheless good enough to shake people down for money) which is claimed to cover their code, and then sued the original developers to stop distribution of the free version, while taking the code (as permitted by the licence) to sell a proprietary version themselves. You might want to choose a licence which gives you some defence against patent aggression, and GPLv3 is the latest and greatest in this respect.
But from other people's point of view, BSD licence (without the obnoxious advertising clause) is fine. They can still incorporate the code into GPLed programs if they wish, so there is no real licence fragmentation. Much better than one of the Yet Another Licences which end up fragmenting code into immiscible globs.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The previous replies to the parent post are correct, and in addition, it is doubtful whether it is legally possible to write "public domain code" at all. You automatically hold an exclusive copyright to anything you write (assuming it isn't a work for hire); in order to allow others to freely reuse your code without worrying about getting sued, you need to surrender those rights somehow. A BSD-style license is the simplest way to do that. You could accomplish the same thing by stating that you are placing it in the public domain, but that creates gray areas; the law supports licensing much more unambiguously than self-divesting of copyright. (And the license has the disclaimer of warranty and so forth.)
Wow, two misconceptions packed into one sentence! Impressive!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Uh, how about GCC and just about everything else maintained by GNU? If you're using Linux, chances are you're using a lot of GPL 3 stuff without even knowing it. Stallman isn't entirely crazy for wanting it called GNU/Linux
Maybe not
Well, considering that Larry Lessig (EFF/Creative Commons/Change Congress) and the FSF have been advising Sen. Obama, I'd be willing to put money on the proposition that he's at least heard of "free software."