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It's not question of contribution - it's question of unification...It's not question of contribution - it's question of unification...Posted Nov 18, 2011 9:30 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670)In reply to: It's not question of contribution - it's question of unification... by khim Parent article: Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum (LinuxFr.org)
This discussion always comes up and nobody has any hard data. Neither do I.
But we do know that it is much easier for companies to contribute to existing GPL codebases. Yes we have Apple releasing some things under BSD, and some companies in the firewall, routing, and storage business but even taken together doesn't match the long list of every single Linux release.
This reality simply does not reflect that "companies prefer BSD". There is absolutely a lot of software for which it works well, but it is not a license for everone. Many other things, such as community building, may even be more important.
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It's not question of contribution - it's question of unification... Posted Nov 18, 2011 13:41 UTC (Fri) by BeS (subscriber, #43108) [Link]
I agree I also don't have hard data to back my opinion up.
But in my experience there are three use cases we have to distinguish:
1. Companies want to use Free Software in their proprietary products. For this company AT is right. For them it's much nice to have non-copyleft Free Software than copyleft Free Software because than they can use the code however they wish and don't have to give anything back.
2. Companies who want to use Free Software in-house. In this case companies don't have to care about the details of any Free Software license because they never has any condition for just using the software.
3. Companies want to use Free Software and contribute to the project. In my experience this companies prefer copyleft Free Software because this guaranties that a competitor can't rip them off. With copyleft they can work in a community which also includes other companies and be sure that they will always be able to use the result of the collaborative work because every party has to give back the same rights.
Now, answering the question what license model you prefer is probably a question about what kind of cooperation you want to have with companies? Personally I think 2. is perfectly OK, 3. is the cooperation I want because this grows Free Software for the benefit of all parties involved. 1. is something I don't care about because even if I can understand the rationals behind this kind of use, for me it makes no difference if they use it this way or not.
It's not question of contribution - it's question of unification... Posted Nov 18, 2011 19:36 UTC (Fri) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
#1 does make a difference to you, because Free Software generally tends to be of better quality than proprietary software; fewer bugs now and fewer in the future as many eyeballs submit fixes.
In my experience, the real stumbling block isn't simply using Free Software in proprietary products. Using Linux in an appliance isn't much of an issue if your actual product runs in a JVM.
The problem is using GPLd software in the particular components which companies believe are their competitive advantage and in a way which requires them to give up the source code.
In truth companies vastly overestimate how well secrecy and IP laws work in their favor in the marketplace. But nonetheless they believe they do, and we end up with crappier products because with GPL they'll refuse to use other, better code; or to release the code they do write so it can fixed in a timely manner by others.
Strategic use of the LGPL and BSD licenses can be quite valuable.
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