Is GPL Licensing In Decline?

GMGruman writes "Simon Phipps writes, "As Apache licenses proliferate, two warring camps have formed over whether the GPL is or isn't falling out of favor in favor of the Apache License." But as he explores the issues on both sides, he shows how the binary thinking on the issue is misplaced, and that the truth is more nuanced, with Apache License gaining in commercially focused efforts but GPL appearing to increase in software-freedom-oriented efforts. In other words, it depends on the style of open source."

Comments

Re:Deja Vu

[Anonymous Coward]

A good neighbor keeps the rock music down to a reasonable volume at night, calls 911 when the house is on fire, pays for the broken window their child broke when playing baseball in the backyard, things of that sort. Going out of bounds and claiming that not being permitted to share a select piece of software code bars someone from being able to fulfill the role of a good neighbor is idiotic stupidity. To such a degree that someone who believes such a claim would probably make THEM a bad neighbor. Don't we inherit enough stupidity from politics and region? We needed Richard, I don't surf the web, Stallman to give us more?

Re:Deja Vu

[Barbara, not Barbie]

There's an easier way to get around the GPL - load an unmodified copy into ram, then patch it. Copyright only applies to software when it is in a fixed form, such as on a hard disk, or a DVD. This is why it is not a violation of copyright to make a copy of a program when you load it into ram.

So, no need to do a TIVOization to use a modified Linux kernel - just load the stock kernel, patch the ram image with your own proprietary code, and there's no obligation to distribute the source for either the patch OR the code that does the patching.

Nintendo lost when they tried to argue that Game Genie was making an unauthorized copy by patching code in memory - the courts ruled that the law simply doesn't apply to transient copies in ram, just to copies that have some modicum of "permanence."

The same loophole applies to ANY GPL code. Copies patched in ram are untouchable.

Also, it is the "forced got to give back the changes" that has resulted in too many forks, which is one of the reasons you'll never see a "year of the linux desktop." It's also why for most users even the latest linux desktops can't compete with 10-year-old XP - all the energy that could have gone into fixing the problems if there were only one or two distros has been dissipated (wasted) in generating a dysfunctional ecosystem of over 1,000 "me-too" distros. Plus, since there's very little opportunity to actually make money fixing the problems, they don't get fixed. Only a freetard will continue to argue otherwise when even Vista has more users, and works better. You know linux on the desktop sucks when you can't even GIVE it away.

It has its' place - on servers, in supercomputers, or with the fugliness hidden away under a runtime like Android, but that's about it.

Re:Deja Vu

[Barbara, not Barbie]

The only shill here is you - I've been using linux since slackware 3x, and finally decided this month that it's simply not worth wasting any more of my time as a primary OS, not when every update breaks something. So I dug out the old XP disk, and all my problems disappeared. Right now, I use a knoppix disk to surf the net, set to save a persistent overlay image of my data on one drive, because this way no update can hose my data like opensuse did, or render the machine unbootable, like fedora did, or leak memory like crazy, like both fedora and debian did.

All linux distros are ultimately craptops in comparison. And that's sad. 15 years using linux, and in the end it was a waste of time and energy. So when people ask, now I tell them to get a mac, or if its a server, to run freebsd, which doesn't curl up in an ugly ball and die when you have to log in remotely to a machine 500 miles away and upgrade from, for example, version 4.7 to version 7.0 without rebooting more than once, and works with no problems after, so the machine is off-line less than 30 seconds total.

It makes even the latest linux look like a consumer-level toy OS in comparison, and until everyone takes the need for a stable ABI and a proper upgrade process as the absolute minimum, that won't change.