Re: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Posted Sep 23, 2006 12:55 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Re: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3 by mingo
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

people are already giving back much, much more to Linux and FOSS than the GPL forces us to do. [...] In my opinion the BSD license does not achieve that.

It is quite unfair to say that. Have you seen the wealth and breadth of documentation available for FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD (in many cases much better than for Linux)? The number of contributors for the many Apache packages? Or the SubVersion manuals? PostgreSQL documentation? I wish all GPL-licensed programs were so good in these respects.

No, the crux of the matter lies elsewhere; not in volunteer contributions, but in corporate contributions and sponsorship. Companies must justify their contributions, and a BSD-style license lets them get away with keeping them secret.