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Leaving the GPL Behind

Posted by kdawson on from the one-license-to-rule-them-all dept.

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."

2 of 543 comments (clear)

  1. Control freak by synthespian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
    1. Re:Control freak by Squiggle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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      Complexity Happens