Quote of the week

"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.

Eben Moglen has a wry comment about this; he says that BSD-style licenses are "a really good license for your competitor to use."

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.

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.

Can you name one significant project that has been killed by a proprietary derivative made possible through its permissive licensing?

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.