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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."
Keep in mind, the basis behind GPL isn't it just have code that's open, it's to have code that STAYS open.
It's essentially self-perpetuating open source. I don't get all the people who discuss GPL work-arounds. It's really simple. If the GPL isn't for you, look for something with an MIT license, or even something in the public domain, or fucking code your own. The GPL borders on being an ecosystem, and if you wanna plunder it and move on, go somewhere else.
Every GNU zealout shouts this out at the top of their lungs, it should be pretty easy to understand by now: If you don't like the GPL license, don't fucking link to a GPL'd library. End of discussion.
Folks at KDE have a comparison table for various software licenses. The table might throw some light on the reason why the GPL is where it is today.
From TFA:
To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on
False; they simply have to make it available.
Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe.
False; RMS himself used to charge $150 for tapes of the GNU system. The GPL FAQ specifically states that you may charge for software under the terms of the GPL. Here's a current example of GPL software being sold for money.
So in short: either they didn't do their homework, or they're deliberately spreading FUD.
Lesse, midnight on a boring middle-of-the-week Wednesday, just got through watching an old rerun of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars on the WGN Late-Nite-At-The-Westerns, but there's nothing good on now, and nothing else to watch on DVD, so what is kdawson's answer to this dilemma?
"Eureka! A flame-fest between the BSD Zealots and the GPL Fanatics, that ought to keep me entertained for the next 4 or 5 hours!"
[rummages through the inbox looking for good dry kindling, a match, some dynamite, and ...]
Come on, Guys and Gals, this is a setup piece for a flame-war, if I've *ever* seen one, you've *all* been had...
Maybe this?
People in scientific and technical fields generally appreciate the precise use of language.
The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are different. RMS is right to insist upon the distinction.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The lack of IP protection (nee, the deliberate elimination of IP protection) is not something companies who innovate are likely to embrace.
There is no actual evidence for that - in fact the evidence (academic studies) point the other way. Most of the studies are on patents, not copyright, but it is all the evidence there is.
The GPL protects any actual innovator better than BSD style licenses because it stops free riders. See Zed Shaw's explanation of why he uses the GPL: http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html .
The article gives one actual real life example, and they prefer the Apache license because they prefer the patent clause, not because they want to allow proprietary forks.
BSD style licenses can be better for those who want to accept outside patches and sell a proprietary version (e.g. Django). It is more appealing to the outside contributors than a copyright assignment (like MySQL and ZImbra). In many cases they could also use the LGPL (provided they can cleanly separate the proprietary and open components), and I have no idea why they do not.
I'm not sure how many businesses need to exist that just distribute other peoples' code though.
This misses much of the problem though. You can create a full application of original code, then be forbidden to statically link with a tiny GPL library or borrow a couple of routines without making your whole product fall under GPL. This isn't a commercializing GPL code or rebundling it.
And yes, many applications must statically link and are unable to use dynamic libraries or plugins.
The result really is that a GPL license is poison to many companies, not matter how trivial the library or routines are you want to use. Even if you find a way to use GPL code properly a lot of companies still won't touch it just out of its reputation and legal headaches. (What's cheaper, buying a third party commercial library, getting the lawyers involved to figure out if the license really isn't a problem, or just going with BSD?)
How can you ripoff something that is freely given to all to use as they see fit as long they follow it's simple terms?
By refusing to follow those terms?
Of course you can fork both GPL and BSD licensed projects.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What you missed is that there's a difference between your definitions of "free" and "open source" and what that word and that phrase literally mean to the vast majority of people (even the majority of IT people).
Well people got it wrong. The definition "open source" was deliberately created to avoid the confusion with "free software". The "Free Software Foundation" was created in *1985*, and RMS (and many GPL software creators) has been using the term "free software" for GPL software consistently.
The definition is based on the notion that the user of the software is free. If he uses a GPL-ed software, he will be forever be able share it with his friends, and to modify it, even if the program was modified by Red Hat, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or IBM. No strings attached. Forever.
Now you can call "free" a program that you got without having to pay. Probably you're born after 1985 and are younger than the Free Software Fundation.
"If there was no concept of copyright in the world, then the GPL would not be needed to cancel this nonexistent concept out."
Incorrect. The GPL requires copyright to keep the source code available. Without the license, one of the ways people could pretend that copyright does not exist is by making modifications, compiling a binary, and not giving out the modified source code.
I personally happen to believe that this is largely unnecessary, since it's in a businesses long term self interest to give source changes back to the public maintainers in order to offload ongoing maintenance; otherwise, they're spending all their time playing integrate-the-changes. I typically pick the BSD license, which is as close to public domain as you can get while still avoiding the tort consequences that would otherwise attach without a hold-harmless. This is mostly because there are no civil protections for people who put things into the public domain directly.
But make no mistake: the GPL is more dependent on copyright law than the BSD license.
-- Terry
>How can you ripoff something that is freely given to all
By giving it a new name and removing all references to the original authors?
Consider the Trolltech and Qt licence debacle where the loudest of the GPL advocates refused to even read the licence Qt was under and the many amendments it underwent. It was GPL or nothing, and there were even years of sour grapes after that
Errrm... you do realise the whole Qt license debacle happened largely because the KDE developers chose both to license their own code under the GPL and to use Qt? If they'd either used a different toolkit or got their licensing straight, there wouldn't have been such an issue.
As it was, though, the problem was that KDE basically wasn't legally distributable due to the licensing snafu; the additional requirements in the QPL made it GPL incompatible, so you couldn't have an app that used code licensed under both.
Also, have you actually read the QPL? It's actually more restrictive than the GPL.
Take a GPL'd piece of code and remove the GPL - what do you have left? All you are left with is plain old Copyright which means you can't use the code (which was GPL'd) at all without the holder's permission; you could contact them for a licence (so that argument of having to re-invent the wheel is bogus), or get your own code written any way. The only reason GPL is viral or poison is the underlying Copyright - GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have; without GPL you lose those right and would be in [danger of] copyright infringement if you were to use it commercially.
As a commercial company your aim is to generate profits which means as low as possible with the costs and as high as possible with the income from sales (whether that be sales of goods, services, etc). Which means that if you need a code library you try to get it as cheaply as possible - ie something like BSD licensed code where you don't have to pay the authors a single cent.
However, some authors object to you piggy backing them and making money off their effort with no reward to themselves; so they insist that the payment to them is that you release any modification to their code like they originally released their code so that others can also benefit from the code (ie GPL). Now if a company doesn't like this way of doing things, they are free to contact the original author(s) to license the code under different terms, one where money would more than likely have to change hands from the company to the author(s), thus putting up the costs, especially if a piece of GPL code has had a few modifications in which case EVERY one of those authors would have to be contacted and a licence agreed between each and every one of them (not needing to re-invent the wheel).
Also, how much can you trust closed source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someones copyright?
The only conclusion I can come to is that all those who moan about the GPL are those who would rather not pay the author(s) for their work - get something for nothing. Aaaaarrrrrrrrr, Jim Lad...
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
Of course they have. The main reason BSD got sidelined, after growing very nicely thank you to start with, was the AT&T USL lawsuit spreading FUD and scaring users off. AT&T are not SCO and made for a pretty formidable opponent. By the time the litigation was over (AT&T backed down after it was found that a lot of BSD code had been subsumed into SVR4) and the unencumbered 4.4-BSD Lite was released, Linux had already gained traction (a working TCP stack) and was collecting up a lot of users disillusioned with the AT&T shenanigans. That the settlement was kept secret also added to the FUD and BSD, as a result, was almost left deserted and unloved. The licence and Linux being GPL really didn't make one iota of difference. Even Linus said later that had BSD been available and its status not legally dubious, he probably wouldn't have started on Linux.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I'm not talking about open, community-driven projects. I'm talking about projects where a company (say, A Plc) commissions another company (say, Dev Ltd) to create custom software for it. A Plc would like to be able to use the software they are paying for without limitation.
Dev Ltd is providing a service as opposed to a product, and ideally A Plc would be assigned the copyright for the code so that they could licence it as they wish with no conditions. This approach is undesirable for the developer, because it reduces their ability to reuse code across projects for different customers.
What I'm suggesting is that Dev Ltd retains copyright over the code, but licenses it to A plc using a BSD-like licence. This gives A Plc the freedom to use the code they have paid for as they see fit, but also gives Dev Ltd the freedom to reuse code.
Remember that the reuse of code does not necessarily mean that commercially sensitive features will be transferred from A Plc to another of Dev Ltd's customers, if the customer is responsible for setting the specification. The only effect is that Dev Ltd is able to deliver more quickly.
I don't see how licensing the code under the GPL is any sort of safety net for Dev Ltd in comparison to the BSD licence, given that it wouldn't prevent a potential competitor who might get hold of the code from offering that code under the exact same terms, but without the cost overhead of actually having to do the development work.
The GPL does not guarantee that you will get any changes back. The competing developer only needs to share the source with their own customer, and there is no guarantee that that customer will share the code or even take advantage of the offer of the source code at all.
Linux is just the kernel. If you are trying to conflate the developer community of that
last bit of GNU with the entire developer community of FreeBSD then you are trying to
push an obviously bogus argument. Linux in the vernacular is Linux + GNU + a whole lot
of other userland stuff. It's the "whole lot of userland" stuff that's really the most
interesting part and what really determines which approach is more useful.
Sure, a lot (if not most) of the Linux userland stuff is generally exploitable by any
Unix. However, it's the Linux community (users and developers) that the engine that
drives everything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.