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.