Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:38 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by tbird20d
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

The easiest way to avoid violating the GPL is not to use it. People here are screaming because that's not the behavior they WANT, but wanting water to flow uphill doesn't make it happen.

Did you guys not NOTICE?

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/233753/gpl-c...

Google's "No GPL in userspace" thing is very much _not_ an isolated incident. Those of us who were big GPLv2 advocates and don't like GPLv3, what did you EXPECT us to do when you tried to shove v3 down our throats?

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:58 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

These numbers, in themselves, don't prove anything about a change in attitudes towards the GPL. The *absolute* number of GPL projects is increasing. The relative number is certainly decreasing, but how much of that is because people who previously liked the GPL no longer do and how much of it is because more people are coming to free software development from a web background with less tradition of strong copyleft licenses?

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:18 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (1 responses)

According to netcraft the absolute number of IIS web servers has been increasing steadily too, ever since the 1990's.

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:47 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Yes, and that's equally meaningless as an individual statistic. Extracting meaning takes knowledge of population changes.