Leaving the GPL Behind

olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. 'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."

Comments

Re:Lost the point

[that_itch_kid]

Some of us find it a bit improper/offensive when these people claim copyright over something that doesn't actually contain any of their work.

Claim copyright? What sort of sensationalist dipshit are you? You make RMS look like a mellow, tolerant, effacing individual.

Point out to me, sunshine: Where exactly does the GPL claim copyright over code that wasn't written by the original author? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

The GPL states that if you want to redistribute the code, you have to follow some guidelines. As the GP says, if you don't want to follow the guidelines of redistribution, go elsewhere. The idea is to promote an ecosystem of sharing. People who want to take and use the code and not share their own back for everybody else to benefit, are not welcome.

Re:ORLY?

[smash]

Ahh you drank the RMS cool-aid. GPL is not free, as it takes away your ability to use the code in commercial products whilst keeping your enhancements closed-source.

Re:Yup, beware of fascists... they are over THERE!

[jedidiah]

"The hairy scary man was mean to me, waaahh!"

You sound like some crackpot from the Family Research Council.

They make lots of bogus noises about oppression too.