Quote of the week

Quote of the week

Posted Jul 17, 2010 5:30 UTC (Sat) by lambda (subscriber, #40735)
In reply to: Quote of the week by djm
Parent article: Quote of the week

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.

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.

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