Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Adam King said... matthews, Make a post on one of those accounts right now and I will believe it is you. "
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. Qt was the small soft target next to the MIT, X and BSD licences so was the head that was wanted on a stake.
Remove a couple of people purely in it for the politics from the discussion and it's a completely different story with tolerence of many licences based purely upon the content of those licences. I'm talking about RMS mostly but there are a few others in it for the politics who do not like other open source groups (and please don't nitpick about alternative definitions of "open source" "free" etc). He has done many admirable things but remember that his agenda will not necessarily always line up with your own (eg. going from years of the stupid "linux, never heard of it" joke to implied ownership when gnu are not even capable of tracking down the code to their own abandoned projects).