GPL, Copyleft On the Rise

paxcoder writes "Contrary to earlier analyses that predicted a decline of copyleft software share to as little as 50% this year, John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, claims the opposite has happened: In his talk at FOSDEM 2012 titled 'Is Copyleft Being Framed?,' Sullivan presented evidence (PDF) of a consistent increase of usage of copyleft licenses in relation to the usage of permissive licenses in free software projects over the past few years. Using publicly available package information provided by the Debian project, his study showed that the number of packages using the GPL family in that distribution this year reached a share of 93% of all packages with (L)GPLv3 usage rising 400% between the last two Debian versions."

Comments

Re:Makes sense

[fyngyrz]

GPL for applications

So that no commercial interest can benefit from your source code, thereby intentionally pushing the freeware / non-commercial approach, yes?

And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.

Thereby enabling all approaches equally, and may the best approach succeed. Well, that seems much more even handed, fair, and so forth.

So... if you want to do that with source code that comes from a university, why not with source code that comes from elsewhere, given that you're handing out the source code anyway? Did I miss a philosophical point here, or is your approach as contradictory as it looks?

Isn't it easy enough to see that all the licenses solve different problems?

Well, no, not really. Seems to me that the GPL causes a problem -- it creates a reserve of software that can't make it to the broader marketplace because it can't go commercial (because it can very easily convert what was private IP into public IP.) That's why when I write software that I intend to share, I never use the GPL.