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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."
The earlier study looked at a much broader base of projects, not just cherry-picking by limiting itself to packages in a distro.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
IMO, if you're writing or releasing software, the GPL is preferrable. You benefit from patches, even being able to take those people don't intentionally contribute. You keep your code unusuable to those competitors who follow a closed management model. You also get to use it as advertisement if you're willing to offer an alternate license for money.
If you're looking to use somebody else's software though, of course the BSD is best. But the thing is that once you spent a few months working on code, a BSD license can be a bit of a hard sell for anything important, because you have nothing of the above. I think for most people some degree of attachment and desire of control develops after spending a lot of time on something.
I've seen so many developers just slap the GPL on their code because it's perceived as the "default" choice. When asked why they chose to use the GPL, they can't even explain its basic provisions. When told how it works, many of those same developers will say "oh, that's not really my intent." Sadly, because of the original "default" perception, a ton of code gets licensed this way.
I aggressively support the right to license something any way creators see fit, and happen to license my most of my stuff under the BSD and Artistic licenses. That said, people really need to understand what different licenses provide before they run off using them. When in any doubt whatsoever regarding any of it, it wouldn't be a terrible idea to pay for an hour of a lawyer's time (if possible).
Write failed: Broken pipe
I think the FSF might be a bit biased. Don't you.
While non-copyleft licenses like the Mozilla, Apache, and LGPLv3 are quite popular for core services and libraries, most applications I've used over the years were copyleft/GPL type licenses.
If you're building a core service, you want it used by as many people and projects as possible. But if you're developing a tool, utility, or application, often your concern is more to prevent any one company or individual from seizing that work and selling it as their own product.
Personally I use both LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses as a result, because the goals of the different software components are not the same.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You left out the part where the pro-GPL study comes from the authors and advocates of the GPL.
Thanks for the hint (its astounding the way that accusations from shills so often point you in the direction of what they themselves are doing). You left out the fact that the original data came from a Microsoft partner involved in Codeplex. Immediately I saw your post I thought to search for that.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Ooh look, a liar.
Good way to completely incorrectly representing how the GPL works.
Bullshit, plain and simple. There are LOTS of non-GPL packages, proprietary packages even, that run on Linux.
And for so blatantly lying and deliberately misrepresenting the GPL you deserve it.