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

Control freak

[synthespian]

Editor's note: InfoWorld tried to interview Richard Stallman, who runs the Free Software Foundation that created and manages the GPL, on this issue, but he demanded control of what we published, so we declined.

I LOLed.

Re:Control freak

[Squiggle]

RMS actually makes a distinction between different types of information and how free it needs to be. At one of his talks he discussed 3 categories:

1) works of practical use (educational materials, software tools, etc):
        - should be free (GPL)

2) works of testimony (what people experienced or believe):
        - republishing with modification is misrepresentation,
        - commercial use covered by existing copyright

3) works of art and entertainment:
        - commercial use requires permission, personal use is fine

His position is nuanced, not stupid. I actually think the distinction is too difficult to make and it is best to error on the side of freedom, but there are certainly some tricky "moral rights" or artistic integrity issues for categories 2 and 3 with GPL-style freedom.

Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth

[smash]

Exactly. There's a clear difference between GPL zealots and BSD zealots (of which, I am one).

• GPL people want code to be publicly available no matter what.
• BSD people just want the code to be used for the good of society; if you make money off it, so what.

If TCP/IP was originally GPLed, the protocol would probably not have taken off. BSD licensing (or public domain) promotes standards propogation. GPL encourages reinvention of the wheel, when someone decides that (heaven forbid) they want to be paid for their work (be it huge code additions, or just packaging up free code in a nicer package, or whatever).

Me? I'd much rather there was freely available BSD code for whatever problems have already been solved. Commercial products would be free to implement this well tested, standards compliant code and provide additional features that others may or may not be interested in. Those not interested in paying could take the base, well tested code and write their own pretty interface (or whatever) for it.