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Viral licensingViral licensingPosted Jul 1, 2005 19:41 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104)Parent article: ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet) Quoth ESR: The pros and cons of "viral licensing" is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. As far back as 1998, I suspected that allegiance to the GPL is actually evidence that open source developers don't really believe their own story. That is, if we really believe that open source is a superior system of production, and therefore that it will drive out closed source in a free market, then why do we think we need infectious licensing? What do we think we gain by punishing defectors?To follow that logic, forbidding bribery is evidence that democracy doesn't work. If we really believe that the people can elect the best, the most honest and most qualified representatives, why do we need to forbid them take gifts for their work? Who do you think we are punishing? The thing is, outlawing bribery is a necessary part of democracy just like outlawing non-free forks is a necessary part of free software development. There are many things that would not be needed in the ideal world, but the world is far from being ideal.
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Viral licensing Posted Jul 1, 2005 21:45 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link] I think that RMS would say that this shows the difference between Free Software and Open Source. An Open Source person says that the GPL is unnecessary because proprietary software can't compete, even if it's free to leech off BSD licensed code. A Free Software person says that the GPL is still necessary because it preserves our rights as software users. I guess that I'm solidly in the Free Software camp.
Viral licensing Posted Jul 2, 2005 0:39 UTC (Sat) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I agree. Sure, some projects can thrive without "viral licensing". Apache is an excellent example. Developers are motivated to participate because their code will run on half of the world's webservers. Users prefer code they and everyone can inspect for security holes. Making a closed fork would give too little for most users. The project is mostly feature complete, and even most easy optimizations have been made.Some projects cannot be successful without "viral licensing". Some would not be as successful as they could have been. Wine was already quoted as an example. Companies have a strong motivation to take the code and implement missing features needed to port their Windows software. Those companies are not interested in releasing their changes for potential competitors. Wine has made significant progress since it switched from a BSD-like license to LGPL. Its code size grows as fast as never before (and it's not bloat, mind you, since a re-implementation of Win32 API cannot be lean and mean). gcc is another example of a project benefiting from GPL. Had it used a "non-viral" license, we would have proprietary forks "leased" for $1000 per seat per year. Making a good compiler is hard, and there are few people qualified to make major changes in a compiler. It's not something many people will do for free. GPL ensures that gcc gurus get paid while the product of their work remains free. GPL is more useful for some projects than for others, but the bottom line, it's useful and it works really well. If not GPL, ESR would have paid for the compiler he compiles fetchmail with.
Viral licensing Posted Jul 4, 2005 7:34 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Not trying to rain on your parade, but Wine has NOT "made substantial progress since it switched to LGPL".
It made huge strides under the previous licence, thanks to Corel and PerfectOffice 2000. Although that does show up the faults in the system too - Corel ended up forking Wine - WPO2K runs on the forked version - but ALL the modified fork was handed over to the Wine project to be gutted/reclaimed/whatever to improve the official version.
The important thing here is, Corel were honest. They forked Wine because they needed a stable system they could trust. They said they would, and did, terminate the fork with WPO2K. And they handed everything over to be folded back into the official version if it was worth having.
Cheers,
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