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Getting Through the FOSS License Minefield
dotancohen writes "Here's an exercise: Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism. Easy, right? Except for that pesky licensing bit. Our own Shlomi Fish gives an overview of the various options in picking up a licence for one's FOSS project, and tries to give some guidelines choosing one."
GPL if you want to make people play nice.
BSD if you don't care if people play nice.
if GPL then GPL3 if you think corporate interests may be sniffing around later.
Something else if you are building upon something that is licensed some other way.
And gee, I didn't hear an explosion anywhere.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Not a minefield, but it's a case that's commonly overlooked by GPL advocates. It's trivial to take a GPL'd program and make it communicate with a proprietary program using a well-defined IPC mechanism, which subverts the intent of the GPL. If you are a big proprietary-software company you can easily use GPL'd code with a (relatively) small investment in building the abstraction layer. If, on the other hand, you're a Free Software developer wanting to use GPL'd code with some other GPL-incompatible Free Software license (e.g. porting ZFS to Linux) then you have problems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The author mentions on one occasion that he read the GPL v2 once and didn't understand it. And then he goes on to write an entire article about choosing the right licence for your FOSS code.
Thats a little like me telling people that they shouldn't program in Pascal and that C is the best... even though I tried to program in Pascal once but just didn't get it.
Is it just me?
I suppose that depends on how you look at it.
If your considering using open source code to add value to your product rather than invest in the development of your own software and have no desire to contribute back to the open source project that made the code available in the first place because you realize this will only make it easier for a competitor to create a competing product in the market place, then the the open source licensing options are a minefield. That pesky GPL keeps getting in the way.
Of course that is not how this article was worded, it seems to be making an argument that for an open source developer who does not choose a license that makes it possible to create derivatives of their project as closed source is somehow stepping on a mine. So yes, it appears you are right, just a GPL troll article.
I wonder sometimes what the motives are behind these articles that profess the importance of avoiding the GPL for your own personal open source projects. I find this one ludicrous as it boils down to "if you license your source code using the GPL then you can't use my source code".
Well, that works both ways, and with the vast source of GPLed code out there it seems to me that this argument supports the use of the GPL in your open source projects to ensure you have access to that pool.
And for those who don't want to use the GPL for whatever reason they don't have to, but they really should stop drooling over other peoples GPLed code and it does them no good to continue the endless whining about the GPL. They should spend their time writing their own software and releasing it under whatever license they want instead of writing inane articles about the GPL.