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

misleading

[wizardforce]

The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license, GPL is a license that protects those who use and modify the software from their predecessors, BSD is open code with the ability to conceal the source. The two among others are for different purposes and saying that there is one license to do the work of all is just as absurd as saying the GPL is dead. Until we see alternative OSes based on alternative licenses take a bigger spot than LInux, the GPL is in no danger. Furthermore, the goal of FOSS is more than just the GPL, it is the expansion of freedom to share and modify code and as long as FOSS as a whole is growing GPL or not it's a good thing.

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.

This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth

[BadAnalogyGuy]

There is a small but vocal group of Free Software zealots who make life miserable for anyone who thinks that the GPL isn't the end-all and be-all of Open Source licenses. They frequently point out problems they perceive with other licenses like BSD without conceding that their perspective may not be applicable/correct/logical/reasonable. These are what I call the Free Software Fascists. They claim to work for the greater good of the OSS movement, but their actions are only self-serving.

This is not to say that everyone who chooses the GPL is one of these. There are many reasons to use the GPL, the greatest among them is how the GPL guarantees software freedom for all users, not just the developers. This is a respectable choice, though it does tend towards indian-giving.

It's difficult to say that the GPL fails to be useful to business because 1) there are businesses which quite efficiently use GPL software and tools and 2) it was not written with commercialization in mind (in fact, commercialization of GPL software is completely tangential to the GPL). But in its own way, the GPL makes itself hostile to developers basing their products on the base GPL libraries/software. In a very real sense, by demanding software freedom, the GPL makes any software it covers poison to a software product company.

So the article is right. There are many software/hardware product companies who are shunning Linux and the GPL. The lack of IP protection (nee, the deliberate elimination of IP protection) is not something companies who innovate are likely to embrace. On the other hand, the article is wrong in that GPL software usage has never been higher. The existence of GPL software helps many companies be able to compete due to lower implementation and licensing costs.

Which side you believe is the side you already believe.

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

[Desler]

However there are proprietary ripoffs of Apache and that is the problem that the GPL tries to defeat.

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? Ripping off implies that you are taking something without someone's consent which is clearly not the case for proprietary software that is based on Apache/MIT/BSD/etc licensed software.

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

[Mystra_x64]

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

You have an option to write your own tiny library you know.

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

[maxwell demon]

And in what way does the existence of that GPLed code make your work any harder than it would be if the code simply didn't exist? Or if it would exist, but buried deep inside some proprietary application whose source you won't even get to see, much less be allowed to use?

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

[Ciggy]

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...

Here is a comparison table for those interested

[bogaboga]

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.

Moderate Article As Troll -1

[bmo]

Fer crissakes.

This is a big whiny piece about how poor poor kleptocrats can't use GPLed code without giving back. Well, don't use it. Duh. There's no shortage of proprietary code.

And then it ends the article with the old fragmentation canard.

I expected to see Dan "Lyin'" Lyons in the byline.

Yellow journalism, anyone?

"Fair and Balanced"

--
BMO

Re:percentage of GPLd projects is irrelevant

[McSnarf]

Many business types can't get their brain around the concept of cooperation.

...while many hobbyists don't understand business. A lot of the discussion above reminded me of tree-hugging eco zealots. Living in their small, limited world, believing in what they do, even if they studied liberal arts (and try to turn "life sciences" into liberal arts).

Let me give you an example: A great platform for working with microcontrollers is the Arduino. Google it, if necessary. It is open, you expect open source software with any shields (hardware addons) you can buy and developing applications interacting with the real world is a lot of fun. People built model plane USVs with GPS control and 3D printers with Arduino. Even some non-free spinoffs exist, but noone is really upset about them.

Great fun, useful, brilliant environment built on free soft- and hardware.

Now let's have a look at Mr. Liu. He runs a very small company (jyetech) that produces a very, very cheap, very simple oscilloscope. I own one - and for the things I do with it, it is more than adequate.

You could download the documentation and schematics from his website and build yourself that scope with a little thinking. (To find that it is actually cheaper to buy a kit or a completed device.)

But what about the software? Should be free, shoudn't it?

Someone actually wrote his own software for the scope from scratch. Mr. Liu didn't mind - but HIS software is HIS property. In a forum post somewhere, he explains the reasoning, which I cannot literally quote, but it goes like this:
"In China, a lot of stuff is copied. And bigger companies can build the scope cheaper and sell it more easily. I would be out of business. The competitors can build the hardware, but cannot write the software, and so far, my logo in the boot loader has kept the scope from being stolen."

It sounds a little like security by obscurity - but Mr. Liu seems to know his local competition. Now who would want to force feed the GPL to Mr. Liu because "all software must be free"?

Re:ORLY?

[rtfa-troll]

"fabrication" is a nice word. Lie is better. The Free software foundation, the main proponent of the GPL, actively recommends many other licenses than the GPL and for them and most users there is little difference. It's when you see a lie like this in the headline that you know that someone has an anti FOSS agenda (admittedly, it's in the middle of the Yahoo article, but the person writing it knew which sentence would go at the top in Slashdot). I wonder if yahoo really isn't joining the dark side.

What I've found, however, is that in a commercial environment the GPL is a very important tool. It's the one of the few licenses which can be trusted to build a completely fair sharing system where many companies can come together and produce one set of code without the likelihood of the other companies cheating on them. It's definitely true that commercial entities make more software based on BSD/MIT licenses. However, the fact that you see more contributions to the base software on GPL systems is not an accident. It happens because the commercial entities can be happy that if their contribution is used against them, they will at least have the come back of being able to use changes.

I've seen (and posted about before) many examples where the use of a non copyleft license or a less effective copyleft license has lead to abandoned projects. The most classic being the failure of the ipsilon routing contributions to be pushed back into FreeBSD which died with the operating system. This happens because licenses such as Apache and BSD don't demand contributions, which means that when the lawyers are asked, they often recommend against contributing "for now" and the contributions actually never happen.

For this usage, the AGPLv3 is also a big advance and should IMHO probably be the license of choice for all projects which want to have efficient long term cooperation with commercial software producers going forward. Having said that, the most important thing is to work together with other people who have similar interestes. The F vs OSS debate is all very fine in theory, but in real life everybody has very much to cooperate over. That's seems to be the main reason why Free software foundation generally recommends that people contribute using the projects own license.

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

[rohan972]

Nobody is going to put you in the GNU/Death Camps.

So you admit they exist then.

You are correct, nobody will put you in them. Indeed, you must assemble the GNU/Death Camp yourself. The chain-link fence, razor wire, etc. are available for you to use under the terms of the GNU/DCL. If you are having trouble with assembly or use of GNU/Death Camps, don't even think about posting questions here unless you've RTFM, googled it and searched the mailing list archives.