Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

Posted Sep 28, 2017 4:12 UTC (Thu) by donbarry (guest, #10485)
In reply to: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative by k8to
Parent article: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

Thus the fundamental difference in orientation between the FSF and the OSI. The former was about software freedom as a value in itself, the latter was about pragmatically selling it to industry. And the OSI rapidly began attacking the GPL, as anyone around long enough will remember Raymond's "viral cancer" snipes, which was merely asserting as a lapdog proxy the desires of business then as now. But they dared not exclude the GPL -- it had and has far too many defenders and a vast codebase. They had to whittle it down, which they continue to try to do.

Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

Posted Oct 29, 2017 13:14 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Indeed.

One of the attacks on the GPL I've seen is an argument that GPL-incompatible software can be made to rely (specifically) on other GPL code, but that the GPL only applies to the GPL-incompatible sub-work at link-time, to the resulting in-memory binary.

A project I've been involved in was subject to a sustained amount of pressure on this, by people funded, employed by or running a number of corporates. Ultimately this resulted in them forking (with mostly made-up/counter-factual reasons given in public for the fork) to a Linux Foundation project, interestingly.

They're now distributing code under a permissive license, that is heavily dependent on that pre-existing GPL code that they do not own (least not exclusively; some of it I own).