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A secondary reasoning for some open source licenses might be to prevent others from running off with the good stuff and selling it for profit. The GPL is big on that, but it's never motivated me with Python (hence the tenuous relationship at best with the FSF and GPL software).
Posted Jul 15, 2010 3:12 UTC (Thu)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link] (21 responses)
The FSF has always supported selling things at a profit and has strongly frowned on licenses which directly inhibit for profit activities. The FSF's concern has always been exclusively about user's freedom. Yes, this breaks _some_ for-profit business models, ones which require restricting the freedom of users, but that is an unfortunate side-effect and not the intended goal.
Some projects that I've worked on, in particular the Vorbis codec, have had recommendations directly from RMS to use an X11-style license instead of the (L)GPL specifically because for those projects the facilitation of rights-restricted versions still meant the promotion of user freedom. It was a good call, and I think it illustrates the reasonable and balanced decision making which Guido so unfairly characterizes as some kind of blind anti-commercialism.
He would have been far more accurate to complain that the FSF is primarily motivated by user's freedom, something that not everyone cares about at all or to the same extent. But who wants to, by comparison, paint themselves as indifferent to freedom? ... But that is no excuse for spreading a misleading position.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 7:39 UTC (Thu)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2010 7:53 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (3 responses)
Or for that matter, what about MySQL? that code is all GPL and they were able to make quite a bit of money selling it (in part due to the control of the copyright due to copyright assignment policies, but far from entirely due to that)
there are several other companies that created GPL codebases that have made quite a bit of money selling the company (I believe JBOSS is another example, but I don't remember the details)
Posted Jul 15, 2010 15:59 UTC (Thu)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 16, 2010 5:38 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 16, 2010 22:31 UTC (Fri)
by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
[Link]
Posted Jul 18, 2010 15:04 UTC (Sun)
by hingo (guest, #14792)
[Link]
Posted Jul 15, 2010 8:47 UTC (Thu)
by dark (guest, #8483)
[Link]
Thus, the SCO suit is an example of the danger of licensing proprietary code. Don't do it, folks. It's not safe, and it might infect your entire code base.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 10:36 UTC (Thu)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link] (13 responses)
The GPL definitely breaks (on purpose) the business model where you "run off" with BSD code, enhance and extend it a lot, and finally sell it closed source to prevent your competitors from copying you. This business model looks definitely not anecdotical but quite common to me.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 10:51 UTC (Thu)
by Wout (guest, #8750)
[Link] (12 responses)
My fear is that companies like Apple or Google take code with a BSD like license and use it in a closed product that is so polished and popular that it kills the project the code came from.
So the more GPL based projects, the better.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 12:52 UTC (Thu)
by djm (subscriber, #11651)
[Link] (11 responses)
OpenSSL ended up doing better than ever after RSA released their SSL-C fork. Apache is going fine despite dozens of commercial derivatives. FreeBSD is going great despite Apple basing their OS on it. How many commercial vendors and driver manufacturers have forked the MIT-licensed X11 codebase? Xorg doesn't seem dead to me. Microsoft (Microsoft!) used OpenBSD's libc and utility code in their "Services for Unix" product, but OpenBSD still seems to be making releases.
I really think that the "evil companies will kill our projects by taking our stuff and making it proprietary" is a shibboleth dreamed up by GPL advocates to scare impressionable people into using their preferred license. It certainly seems to have no basis in history.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 17:55 UTC (Thu)
by mrshiny (guest, #4266)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2010 18:08 UTC (Thu)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Jul 15, 2010 19:51 UTC (Thu)
by dwheeler (guest, #1216)
[Link] (3 responses)
"Can you name one significant project that has been killed by a proprietary derivative made possible through its permissive licensing?"
The *BSDs, for one. There was a time when many people expected one of the *BSDs to be the key OSS operating system, but they aren't and I believe they never will be. They haven't been "killed", exactly, but they're a backwater and will stay that way.
One of their biggest problems is, fundamentally, their licensing.
Because of their license, every once in a while a company takes the BSD code and makes a proprietary version... and almost nothing goes back to the BSDs.
Examples include BSDi's BSD/OS (aka BSD/386 aka BSDi) and MacOS.
As a result, the OSS BSDs starve.
In contrast, competitors *do* give back to the Linux kernel, which is why
they Linux kernel and operating systems based on it (aka GNU/Linux) have jumped far ahead.
This is not a new observation;
Richard Hillesley noted that
"It could be argued that the community loses as a result, and that the subsequent fracturing of the code base is one of the reasons that BSD Unix has never captured the imagination of developers and users in the same way that GNU/Linux has."
Some have argued that the court cases of long ago slowed the BSD, but those were settled a very long time ago, and SCO's legal attacks were against Linux not the BSDs... so I don't think that argument works.
It's not a matter of talent; many of the BSD developers are absolutely brilliant. What's more, the BSDs had a head start, and should have beaten Linux-based systems handily. They didn't, primarily because the permissive license was a long-term drain on talent.
As noted in Wine history, the Wine project's "history of licensing has sparked many debates." The WINE project originally had the BSD-old license, a GPL-incompatible license; this incompatibility with the GPL drove the developers to switch to the GPL-compatible X11 license in January 2000. Many developers expressed concern about appropriation of the code by commercial entities, so in March 2002 the developers agreed to switch Wine to the LGPL license. The "ReWind" project was created for those who wanted an X11-licensed codebase, but most developers decided to focus their efforts on synchronizing with the LGPL'ed Wine, and the vast majority of development and new features appear there first. The Wine project reports that shortly after changing the license to the LGPL, development began to pick up at a greater pace (more patches began to appear, the leader Alexandre made more CVS commits, and more applications were reported to work).
NetApp also has had issues with non-copylefting.
Sometimes should choose a non-copyleft license, and sometimes you should choose a copylefting license; I've used both in stuff I've released, depending on my goals and the kind of software it is.
Also, I believe you should choose one of a few widely-used OSS licenses,
one that is GPL-compatible (though not necessarily the GPL).
In short: It is not true that the GPL (or any copylefting license) is always the best license choice. But I do believe that the choice of license matters, because that choice has consequences, and there are sometimes big downsides to choosing a non-copylefting license.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 21:50 UTC (Thu)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's not the it's proprietary that's the problem for the BSDs, it's that it's under *any* more restrictive license. When people take the BSD code and make modifications under the GPL and use it in Linux, it's just as much a problem for the BSDs. There've been many flamewars on this subject, because some people in the BSD camp seem to feel that it's not fair that Linux gets to take everything from BSD but BSD can't take anything from linux. (Of course, that's kinda the whole point of BSD, so, <shrug>.)
> Examples include [...] and MacOS
And same thing here. Apple makes all the kernel source code available under an Open Source License: the APSL 2.0. It's not proprietary, it's just under a more restrictive license than BSD, like the GPL.
Posted Jul 17, 2010 17:08 UTC (Sat)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Yeah, this BSD complaint about GPL "stealing" BSD is so ironic. "Be free to take our code, unless it's for the GPL"
The most ironic of all is that the GPL is expressly designed to prevent this problem.
Posted Jul 15, 2010 22:40 UTC (Thu)
by djm (subscriber, #11651)
[Link]
Posted Jul 16, 2010 0:33 UTC (Fri)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link] (1 responses)
Can you name one significant project that has been killed by a proprietary derivative made possible through its permissive licensing? From my field of computer networking, gated.
Posted Jul 16, 2010 3:59 UTC (Fri)
by djm (subscriber, #11651)
[Link]
Posted Jul 17, 2010 5:30 UTC (Sat)
by lambda (subscriber, #40735)
[Link] (1 responses)
Also, asking for a project that has been killed by proprietary forks is a bit disingenuous. I mean, the old code will still run after a fork; you can always still use the old version, and new development can still happen on it. But you don't get to benefit from the proprietary modifications the same way they have benefitted from your work. How long has BSD suffered because SunOS and SVR4 (and now even other free systems with incompatible licenses, like Darwin, Linux, and OpenSolaris) used lots of their code without contributing back? How much more prominent would BSD now be if that hadn't happened, and those who wanted to use their code had to contribute it back?
It's pretty hard for a free software project to die outright, as anyone can choose to pick it up and start developing it again; but it can be made obsolete, poorly or erratically maintained, or only of interest to hobbyists if the majority of the effort starts going into proprietary forks instead of free software.
Posted Jul 18, 2010 11:56 UTC (Sun)
by djm (subscriber, #11651)
[Link]
Posted Jul 17, 2010 17:19 UTC (Sat)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Trying to summarize (and simplify) other answers: No. But overpowered by a competing GPL project: Yes.
Sometimes the GPL works best, sometimes it's BSD... "it depends" looks like the only correct answer.
I guess a lot of people are not interested in what "works best" anyway, but rather in what they feel is the Right Thing for them.
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Boxed sets do not make fortunes.
I have sold GPL software. It's not that different from selling any other software.
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I'm more worried about the accuracy of the first paragraph. The SCO suit was not an example of what Guido described. I know that SCO claimed something like that in the media—their claims in the media were all over the place—but in their court case they never even alleged anything like this. Instead, their complaint was that IBM had contributed its own code to Linux. Code that IBM had developed in-house, but which (SCO alleged) was based on code that IBM had licensed long ago from one of SCO's predecessors-in-interest.
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Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?
Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?
Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?
Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?
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Can you name one significant project that has been killed by a proprietary derivative made possible through its permissive licensing?
SPICE? I don't know the exact history, or whether it can still be considered to be alive (I haven't done much with hardware in quite a while), but I'm pretty sure that the proprietary derivatives like PSPICE have far surpassed SPICE, without SPICE really being developed an further.
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