Almost Two-Thirds of Software Companies Contributing To Open Source, Says Survey (networkworld.com)
Reader alphadogg writes: Open source's march toward preeminence in business software continued over the past year, according to a survey released by open source management provider Black Duck Software and venture capital firm North Bridge. Roughly two-thirds of respondents to the survey -- which was administered online and drew 1,300 respondents -- said that their companies encouraged developers to contribute to open-source projects, and a similar proportion said that they were actively engaged in doing so already. That's a 5% increase from the previous year's survey.
The MIT and BSD licenses maximize freedom for developers and users. The GPL family of licenses, on the other hand, gives slightly more control to the developer, but removes a lot of freedom from the users of said code.
In a free-market environment, businesses will opt to deal with software having truly free licenses like the MIT and BSD licenses, rather than free-in-hype-only licenses like the GPL family of licenses.
Oh Bullshit, the only freedom the GPL limits is the freedom to be a commercial leach and sell other people's work as your own. If you don't want to play by the GPL rules, fine, don't, but quit whining about losing freedoms that you never had.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Said the GPL fanatic who loves to leech BSD code as well.
It's probably worse because GPL locks up the BSD code - any improvements made to the BSD code cannot be contributed back to the original project!
So maybe it should be less about "closed source leeching" and more about "GPL leeching" as well. Because at least Microsoft and other closed-source companies either contribute, or don't. GPL code makes improvements that cannot be integrated back whilst claiming superiority. And parading the modified code as a big F-U to the BSD folks
Always notice how GPL always claims "closed source exploitation" and not "GPL exploitation"? I think this attitude is worse than just Microsoft etc. "leeching"..