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Linus Loves GPL, But Hates GPL Lawsuits (cio.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader sfcrazy writes: During LinuxCon, Torvalds was full of praise for GNU GPL: "The GPL ensures that nobody is ever going to take advantage of your code. It will remain free and nobody can take that away from you. I think that's a big deal for community management... FSF [Free Software Foundation] and I don't have a loving relationship, but I love GPL v2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back, which meant that the fragmentation has never been something that has been viable from a technical standpoint."
And he thinks the BSD license is bad for everyone: "Over the years, I've become convinced that the BSD license is great for code you don't care about," Torvalds said.
But Linus also addressed the issue of enforcing the GPL on the Linux foundation mailing list when someone proposed a discussion of it at Linuxcon. "I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working title 'Lawyers: poisonous to openness, poisonous to community, poisonous to projects'... quite apart from the risk of loss in a court, the real risk is something that happens whether you win or lose, and in fact whether you go to court or just threaten: the loss of community, and in particular exactly the kind of community that can (and does) help. You lose your friends."
And he thinks the BSD license is bad for everyone: "Over the years, I've become convinced that the BSD license is great for code you don't care about," Torvalds said.
But Linus also addressed the issue of enforcing the GPL on the Linux foundation mailing list when someone proposed a discussion of it at Linuxcon. "I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working title 'Lawyers: poisonous to openness, poisonous to community, poisonous to projects'... quite apart from the risk of loss in a court, the real risk is something that happens whether you win or lose, and in fact whether you go to court or just threaten: the loss of community, and in particular exactly the kind of community that can (and does) help. You lose your friends."
The only restriction the GPL imposes is to prevent you to take away freedom. Thus, the GPL is only "non-free" to those who want to restrict or remove freedom.
Well there is one exception of course, its compatibility with other copyleft licenses. See the whole ZFS license debacle. But that's a negative side effect, and not what the GPL was designed for (however precisely what the CDDL was designed for, but thats a different story).
They aren't. They are concerned about derivative works of THEIR OWN code, concerns that they are legally entitled to have by virtue of having the copyright on the code that they wrote. The fact that a derivative work might have your own code in it is entirely superfluous, if it is a derivative work then you still need the original copyright holder's permission to do something with it. The GPL outlines the terms necessary to receive such permission. Nothing more, and nothing less.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If I was building a Tivo today I'd probably start with a BSD license. It's what Sony did with the PlayStation 4.
Having actually seen that done, both with Linux and FreeBSD (as operating systems in routers), I can tell you a) that I would choose Linux every time and that b) the reason is the license and the lawyers.
For the first year or so you will be concentrating on adding features. Making things you probably benefit from keeping private. With Linux you make these in user space which might occasionally make things more difficult. You will eventually want to add some low level functionality and add it to the kernel.
At the point you start low level work, if you used a BSD licensed kernel, there will be a discussion between lawyers and management and likely you end up keeping your functionality private a) because you can and b) because your competition might use it otherwise. If you have a GPL licensed kernel, you will likely decide to publish and push upstream a) because the license pushes you to and b) because even if your competition uses it you will get the benefit back.
After some time, if you don't contribute upstream, you will find that you have incompatibilities with new software versions and you will stick to a stable version. Eventually you will stop benefiting from the evolution of the upstream software. Long term this is a nightmare for the developers. You lose a tiny bit by being "forced" to contribute back. You actually gain a huge amount back from the community because they continue working on your software.
This has happened often; commercial derivatives of BSD operating systems either fork completely or die. 386BSD, JunOS, OSX, IPSO etc. etc. It's very hard to do long term commercial contributions into a complex BSD environment because technically you are giving away shareholder value with no visible recompense.