'The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position,'

Yeah, well I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out fabrication. Could we have a source for this assertion please?

The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license, GPL is a license that protects those who use and modify the software from their predecessors, BSD is open code with the ability to conceal the source. The two among others are for different purposes and saying that there is one license to do the work of all is just as absurd as saying the GPL is dead. Until we see alternative OSes based on alternative licenses take a bigger spot than LInux, the GPL is in no danger. Furthermore, the goal of FOSS is more than just the GPL, it is the expansion of freedom to share and modify code and as long as FOSS as a whole is growing GPL or not it's a good thing.

Well, RMS for example quibbles over what we call things all the time (open source vs. free software and Linux vs. GNU LInux) and does so with a religious fervor. If you don't think there are GPL zealots just a fanatical you're deluding yourself. I've been personally told before that the "GPL is the only REAL free license" by a fellow developer I once worked with. This sort of attitude is less about giving a company or individual what they want or need and more about making a philosophical/religious point about how you think people should behave and I agree with the article it's stupid and fairly damaging to the reputation and advancement of free/open source software.

There is a small but vocal group of Free Software zealots who make life miserable for anyone who thinks that the GPL isn't the end-all and be-all of Open Source licenses. They frequently point out problems they perceive with other licenses like BSD without conceding that their perspective may not be applicable/correct/logical/reasonable. These are what I call the Free Software Fascists. They claim to work for the greater good of the OSS movement, but their actions are only self-serving.

This is not to say that everyone who chooses the GPL is one of these. There are many reasons to use the GPL, the greatest among them is how the GPL guarantees software freedom for all users, not just the developers. This is a respectable choice, though it does tend towards indian-giving.

It's difficult to say that the GPL fails to be useful to business because 1) there are businesses which quite efficiently use GPL software and tools and 2) it was not written with commercialization in mind (in fact, commercialization of GPL software is completely tangential to the GPL). But in its own way, the GPL makes itself hostile to developers basing their products on the base GPL libraries/software. In a very real sense, by demanding software freedom, the GPL makes any software it covers poison to a software product company.

So the article is right. There are many software/hardware product companies who are shunning Linux and the GPL. The lack of IP protection (nee, the deliberate elimination of IP protection) is not something companies who innovate are likely to embrace. On the other hand, the article is wrong in that GPL software usage has never been higher. The existence of GPL software helps many companies be able to compete due to lower implementation and licensing costs.

Which side you believe is the side you already believe.

Some of us find it a bit improper/offensive when these people claim copyright over something that doesn't actually contain any of their work. It's kind of like if a cookbook publisher tried to stop me from telling people that the ribs recipe on page 104 and the second beans recipe on page 286 go really well together, especially if you also have the cornbread from page 42.

You just know that he would have demanded that Linux be called 'GNU/Linux' and so on. He's known for turning down speaking engagements from people who refuse to do that, too.

I beginning to think Richard Stallman is techdom's Michael Jackson. Once brilliant, his past work is appreciated by all... but he currently exists in a vacuum where he lives off his dwindling reputation and fawning attention of a few creepy adoring fans while everyone else just scratches their heads and wonder what the hell happened to him.

Ok, you really got to learn to not use logic on /., it might confuse some.

My fave part is from the Eclipse guy saying ".....one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
You dont say?
That is not surprising in the least since the GPL is there for the USER's benefit, NOT the developers or corporations.

U-s-e-r.

As for using a license, you use the one that suits you and your needs but many times what companies are looking is for ways to get free development/community while still being able to keep something hidden for their own benefit. That's what BSD is for. If you use it, enjoy but just dont pretend that you are this for anyone's benefit (user or other developers) than your own.

And even the most diehard GPL defenders will agree that you need the LPGL, Affero and other variants like v3. That is NOT one license, they are similar but still not one license.

Yes, because the users get so much benefit from it being harder for developers and corporations to write programs for them.

So, ignoring Windows and Mac, right? Both are bigger and have alternate licenses.

Maybe this freudian slip actually shows the issues with GPL. Although atomically the GPL is clear by itself, using the GPL with other licenses basically forces the whole project to be GPL.

Then again, at the end of the day, users don't give a damn.

Some folks want to take code they had no part in writing, do a few mods, call it their own, and give nothing back to originating source of the code. Some like to call them "commercial developers", but a more common and accurate name is "greedy leaches".

Just to be clear, our choices are fascists, people who share Indians, or businesses, right?

That actually sounds like it's directly contradictory to "business", however you want to define that. If you define business as the pursuit of commercializing a product, then the fact that the GPL wasn't written with commercialization in mind certainly seems like it fails to be useful to a business. At least, no business that is actually writing their own code instead of packaging other peoples' code. If your business involves packaging other peoples' code for distribution then, yeah, I'm sure the GPL is very useful to you. I'm not sure how many businesses need to exist that just distribute other peoples' code though.

If you're talking about developing your own product and then choosing a license, from a business standpoint it does make sense that you would release it under a license that doesn't give everyone else free reign with it. At least not in the short term, once your competitive advantage has worn off with time then it makes perfect sense to give it away for free. See id software for an example on that one.

It's amazing that after so many years people are *still* confusing commercial with proprietary [gnu.org]. 99.9% of the use of Apache is commercial.. and it aint proprietary. However there are proprietary ripoffs of Apache and that is the problem that the GPL tries to defeat.

For companies that would otherwise create IP based on GPL-licensed software, there is almost no distinction between commercialization and proprietary. They cannot commercialize their IP because to do so would force them to make the IP non-proprietary. For companies that create products, the two typically go hand in hand.

However, you're completely correct in pointing out that GPL-licensed software can be commercialized. Linux itself would not exists as it is today if it weren't for the commercialization of it by companies like RedHat and Suse (and Caldera, et al). Commercialization has a very big positive effect on GPL-licensed software. It actually funds the development of the product so as to be useful for the greatest number of customers.

But the GPL itself was written to protect software freedom, not specifically to enable (or destroy) commercialization of the software. It prevents the software from being made proprietary, and through prickly requirements like opening of all code which comes into linkage with GPL-covered software it ensures that the software remains free.

What you missed is that there's a difference between your definitions of "free" and "open source" and what that word and that phrase literally mean to the vast majority of people (even the majority of IT people).

I propose that, for clarity's sake, people who use always the word "free" per the GPL hijacking of the word should start using "GNU/Free" instead - and please use the phrase "GNU/open source" as well. That way we can do away with all the semantic silliness that usually comes out of these discussions, and start debating the real issues.

How can you ripoff something that is freely given to all to use as they see fit as long they follow it's simple terms? Ripping off implies that you are taking something without someone's consent which is clearly not the case for proprietary software that is based on Apache/MIT/BSD/etc licensed software.

Hard to believe but the article show there are *still* 'analysts' who despite having not even the first idea what the GPL asserts, get their opinions into these kinds of articles.

From TFA:

"To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on. Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe."

Yes, and the moon is made of cheese and bad things don't happen to good people.

Fer crissakes.

This is a big whiny piece about how poor poor kleptocrats can't use GPLed code without giving back. Well, don't use it. Duh. There's no shortage of proprietary code.

And then it ends the article with the old fragmentation canard.

I expected to see Dan "Lyin'" Lyons in the byline.

Yellow journalism, anyone?

"Fair and Balanced"

--
BMO

Except of course that (2) means that people suddenly have a lot less reason to buy anything from you, since they can just (legally!) download it from someone else.

That doesn't change the fact that there are outright false statements here.

Which of course means we should all be skeptical of your claims.

I doubt you understand the consequences of your preposition. The C++ standard library is based on templates, so you can't link dynamically to it. Translation units need the whole template definition and declaration in order to successfully instantiate an object or function based on a templated type. If this was the case, all code which used your C++ standard library implementation would have to be released under GPL. Not even LGPL would work here. This is why even GNU does an exception for their implementations of libc and C++ libraries.

You don't have an inherent right to use GPL code without abiding to the license conditions any more than you have the right to breach copyright on other works. No one forces GPL down your throat. You can choose not to use it. If you feel so altruistic, code your own implementation of whatever library you find licensed under GPL and release your code under MIT or BSD.

...while many hobbyists don't understand business. A lot of the discussion above reminded me of tree-hugging eco zealots. Living in their small, limited world, believing in what they do, even if they studied liberal arts (and try to turn "life sciences" into liberal arts).

Let me give you an example: A great platform for working with microcontrollers is the Arduino. Google it, if necessary. It is open, you expect open source software with any shields (hardware addons) you can buy and developing applications interacting with the real world is a lot of fun. People built model plane USVs with GPS control and 3D printers with Arduino. Even some non-free spinoffs exist, but noone is really upset about them.

Great fun, useful, brilliant environment built on free soft- and hardware.

Now let's have a look at Mr. Liu. He runs a very small company (jyetech) that produces a very, very cheap, very simple oscilloscope. I own one - and for the things I do with it, it is more than adequate.

You could download the documentation and schematics from his website and build yourself that scope with a little thinking. (To find that it is actually cheaper to buy a kit or a completed device.)

But what about the software? Should be free, shoudn't it?

Someone actually wrote his own software for the scope from scratch. Mr. Liu didn't mind - but HIS software is HIS property. In a forum post somewhere, he explains the reasoning, which I cannot literally quote, but it goes like this:
"In China, a lot of stuff is copied. And bigger companies can build the scope cheaper and sell it more easily. I would be out of business. The competitors can build the hardware, but cannot write the software, and so far, my logo in the boot loader has kept the scope from being stolen."

It sounds a little like security by obscurity - but Mr. Liu seems to know his local competition. Now who would want to force feed the GPL to Mr. Liu because "all software must be free"?

Mr. Liu can do whatever he wants with his software. It's his. My point is that if Liu wants to build a cooperative community around his software, then GPL is a good way to do it. As it is, Liu's software has been duplicated. Well and good. If Liu wants to ignore the competing software he is free to. Then again, an alternative is to enlist and merge resources and work towards a single more powerful software base. Liu runs the risk of having the competing software go open source, attracting programming resources and himself being unable to keep up. His decision. No one is saying Liu must go GPL. I would say that he should keep it in the back of his mind though, if only to avoid loss of his current advantage.

GPL isn't just a hobbyist thing. Businesses find it quite useful, a a tool to keep each other honest when dealing with a shared resource.

No, you're completely off. They do claim copyright. That's the only way they're able to impose any terms, whatsoever, on what other people may do with the work. Otherwise, it would be public domain-- which is, in fact, the only genuinely free software.

In terms of distributing under the GPL, it's true that it's incompatible with (what's seen as) the standard software business model. If my goal is to sell a bunch of copies to separate individuals, it can undermine that if they can just copy from each other.

This focus is wrong, however. More of the for-pay programming in the world is custom software than the "standard" model. Whatever license applies to their software, companies are often still interested in adding features, improving the stability or security of the applications they use, or better integrating software with their particular systems and situation - with the GPL they can do that work (individually, or several companies in consortium) and ultimately everyone can benefit. In this *most common* case, the GPL is actually a preferable license.

"fabrication" is a nice word. Lie is better. The Free software foundation, the main proponent of the GPL, actively recommends many other licenses than the GPL [gnu.org] and for them and most users there is little difference. It's when you see a lie like this in the headline that you know that someone has an anti FOSS agenda (admittedly, it's in the middle of the Yahoo article, but the person writing it knew which sentence would go at the top in Slashdot). I wonder if yahoo really isn't joining the dark side.

What I've found, however, is that in a commercial environment the GPL is a very important tool. It's the one of the few licenses which can be trusted to build a completely fair sharing system where many companies can come together and produce one set of code without the likelihood of the other companies cheating on them. It's definitely true that commercial entities make more software based on BSD/MIT licenses. However, the fact that you see more contributions to the base software on GPL systems is not an accident. It happens because the commercial entities can be happy that if their contribution is used against them, they will at least have the come back of being able to use changes.

I've seen (and posted about before) many examples where the use of a non copyleft license or a less effective copyleft license has lead to abandoned projects. The most classic being the failure of the ipsilon routing contributions to be pushed back into FreeBSD which died with the operating system. This happens because licenses such as Apache and BSD don't demand contributions, which means that when the lawyers are asked, they often recommend against contributing "for now" and the contributions actually never happen.

For this usage, the AGPLv3 is also a big advance and should IMHO probably be the license of choice for all projects which want to have efficient long term cooperation with commercial software producers going forward. Having said that, the most important thing is to work together with other people who have similar interestes. The F vs OSS debate is all very fine in theory, but in real life everybody has very much to cooperate over. That's seems to be the main reason why Free software foundation generally recommends that people contribute using the projects own license.

I've found that RMS often says things that make me step back and reconsider. For example cloud computing. I always get caught up in the buzzwords, but RMS pointed out that it actually gives people less control.

RMS is all about giving control to the user of the software. His whole philosophy is based upon being free to modify/repair/change any software that you are using, whether in a computer or printer or whatever. The fact that you've bought the software, means (in his mind) that you should have the right to change it. If you've bought a printer that has a bug in it's firmware you should be able to change it.

Companies don't like this idea because they will
1. have more expenses when a fix actually breaks something.
2. their propitiatory software is secret.
3. if you knew how simple the code was you would be upset at the price you paid.
4. competitors will use their code/ideas.
5. whatever

Companies are not consumer oriented. They are profit oriented. RMS is consumer oriented. He sounds eccentric when he talks because people have been brainwashed into thinking along the corporate lines.

If you view what he says from a consumer point of view he sounds very sane. Rather like Ralph Nader seemed eccentric when he went after the pinto.

And what you're doing is willfully ignoring the fact that there ARE semantic issues. Freedom and free-of-charge or not the same thing yet they can both be referred to as "free." This is just as much "hijacking" as the Free Software group.

You clearly understand the situation - semantics and all. Yet you're doing nothing to "start debating the real issues."

Well, there's two ways to answer that.

The first, a moral argument that at the moment I don't have the patience to flesh out: Why do you _have_ to live from your job? Why is your probably-not-all-that-useful sort-of-contribution to society rewarded while theirs should not be?

The second, a practical one: many forms of modern art are simply too labor- and time-intensive to be done for free. Do you really think Half-Life 2 will be made "as a hobby in [somebody's] free time"? While some programming works can be done for free to the end user, they aren't free to the people making it. Linux would not exist as is if there weren't millions of dollars being funneled into it, and the methods of recouping that investment exist that don't involve direct sales of a product. Such doesn't exist for a lot of other methods that people find very valuable. Without copyright, we'll be introducing you to our old friend, the tragedy of the commons.

So, yes, I have no problem with criminalizing your fellow copyright infringers to protect my livelihood, and, quite frankly, I doubt even your fellow copyright infringers will have a problem with it when they realize that that's where the stuff they're passing around comes from. Taken to the extreme that you and your ilk think they would like, you would kill the goose laying the golden egg.

No need for imagination. Just look at the BSD projects and the pathetic support they get from business.

then be forbidden to statically link with a tiny GPL library or borrow a couple of routines without making your whole product fall under GPL

You have an option to write your own tiny library you know.

This misses much of the problem though. You can create a full application of original code, then be forbidden to statically link with a tiny GPL library or borrow a couple of routines without making your whole product fall under GPL. This isn't a commercializing GPL code or rebundling it.

Guess what: If you intend to make your application proprietary, the GPL developers want you to stay clear from their code. So I'd say the GPL works as intended.

Maybe not an indistinct one, but the issue is pretty religious.

As you say, the Free/Open distinction is real enough. But it seems to me that it's the "software wants to be free" zealots who don't get this. They assume that everybody who uses FOSS is behind their entire program. That's why they insist that GPL is the only license anybody needs -- their program only advances if everybody uses it.

What they don't get is that the big backers of Open Source are not schoolyard radicals like RMS. They're big technology companies whose business goals are furthered by the existence of code bases that are accesible to everybody. So they subsidize FOOS projects by giving them money, hardware, programmer time, even management resources. This is what keeps the FOSS movement going.

The zealots see the FOSS movements success as a vindication of their silly theories. In reality, it's just a new business model. Their inability to grasp this is what causes the disconnect over licensing.

Stallman distances [gnu.org] himself from the open source community as much as possible. Both the free software and the open source communities (according to RMS' definition) have entirely different philosophies, with similar technical goals which allows them to work together most of the time.

He can't turn GNU from an open-source software collective into a pseudo political advocacy group because GNU has always been just that, a movement dealing with a social problem, while "open source" in general only refers to the technical standpoint.

When you say, you are 'going with BSD', do you mean, your whole application is going under BSD, or just you ninja'd a BSD library?

The viral nature of the GPL does make it harder to write programs. If you're going to claim it doesn't, then you're ignoring reality.

No. The GPL doesn't do anything to anyones programming abilities. Well, indirectly it makes it easier to write programs, by allowing you to learn from the program's source code.

Yes, and no businesses use Apache either!

Oh, wait ...

The GPL is obviously preferable to closed-source software in this case, but I'm not sure how it's preferable to the BSD/MIT ilk of licences. If I'm paying for the development of a piece of software, I don't want to be limited in what I can do with it (including closed-source distribution) by the developers.

From the customer's point of view, assignment of the copyright to the customer would be preferable to any open source licence. The only impracticality here is that the developer should be free to use 'generic' code samples in projects for other customers.

Last time I looked BSD projects do very well. This has several different reasons, but there is one common:

The companies don't want to maintain their own fork. It is expensive to constantly merge the fixes of the original project with your branch.

This is why companies contribute to Apache, the various BSD operating systems, LLVM, etc.

Just take a look at FreeBSD. Consider how many people work on that compared to Linux. I would say those Linux crowds should be very quite given how little more progress they accomplish compared to the relatively few FreeBSD developers.

And in what way does the existence of that GPLed code make your work any harder than it would be if the code simply didn't exist? Or if it would exist, but buried deep inside some proprietary application whose source you won't even get to see, much less be allowed to use?

GPL is good for anybody not making money directly off software products. I don't buy all the ideology around it, but as Linus says it's a cool license because it enforces tit-for-tat.

However, GPL is the kiss of death for anybody trying to make money selling software products. If you have a software product and publish any of its libraries as GPL, then your product must effectively become GPL'ed. And you put hard work into it and want to charge money for that, but anybody can take that product and sell it cheaper or give it away for free.

You can then play games to work around it (spawn the GPL product from a commercial one and talk to it through a pipe or something) but whatever you do is just a kludge in order to dance around the license.

Personally, I gave away the few small, well-rounded libraries I made under the BSD license. I don't really mind if somebody takes them and uses them to build a product they'll be making money off. The knee-jerk reaction here is that when somebody says "commercial software" people imagine big dominant companies like Apple or Microsoft, but the number of programmers working there is dwarfed by the number of small 1-5 programmer shops trying to make a living.

In fact, I don't even mind if a programmer at Microsoft takes my source code and uses it in a product. I met a few of them and they are mostly nice folks trying to make the best software they can. If Microsoft shareholders profit to an infinitesimal amount from something I gave away for free, I don't really give a fuck.

Dejan

Writing these tiny libraries is not so simple, and can be a huge waste of time.

It sounds like some of those tiny GPL licensed libraries are actually pretty valuable. In which case, you as a software developer will have to pay to use them. The price is compliance with the GPL.

Which is why these companies go to software with BSD or other licenses.

If a non-GPL licensed equivalent exists then your previous argument doesn't apply and the company is welcome to use the non-GPL library at no cost to themselves. That also has no impact on their own choice of license.

Has anyone ever analyzed why Linux took off and BSD didn't, and what role the license played in this?

See the Explaining BSD [freebsd.org] document on the FreeBSD site, particularly the mention of the AT&T court case against BSDI. That said, BSD has "taken off" - it's used in many embedded devices and in many roles as a server OS. For example, Yahoo! rely on FreeBSD as their principal server OS, as do many other companies with large numbers of webservers such as web hosting outfits (Pair Networks for example). Mac OS X undoubtedly bigger than Linux in terms of desktop usage, and is based on a 4.3BSD core which has been updated with code from NetBSD and FreeBSD.

This depends on circumstances. In most cases the majority of the entities working on the software are not competitors, however competitors also can use the software.

When you release BSD software, you get equal support to all the other people who cooperate with you. However, your competitors have a possibility to get a specific advantage. They can take your software, use it as you do, but add their own proprietary changes which they do not share.

This means that companies should not contribute to BSD projects without considerable care. E.g. if a feature is basic and your competitor already has it in their products you can contribute it because your competitor won't benefit. If a feature is advanced and product differentiating then you should never release it to a BSD project.

With a GPL project, there is another option. You contribute to the project. Any competitors which take that feature change their relationship with you. You and your former competitor cooperate in an open and legal way in one particular area (this is legal because it is directly to the benefit of the consumers / public etc.) whilst competing on others (service ; hardware ; other software bundled etc.).

In theory, this means that BSD software is better for short throw away projects where you will never work with anyone else whilst GPL is better for long term stable projects where cooperation will be most valuable. In practice, things which are planned short term very often become long term. This means it's normally better to use and release GPL software

There is one exception to this. If you are releasing a feature that you want everybody to use, including proprietary vendors, then you might find that the GNU All Permissive License [gnu.org] is a good option. At least noticing its existence is quite ironic given the summary on this story.

Which is what the LGPL is invented for. The licence for Apps is the GPL, the license for libraries is the LGPL. If you link with LGPL code, you just have to make the source of the library available - in the for you used it. So if you bugfix or enhance the library, you must offer forward the bugfixes - and it makes sense to submit them back, so the community gains. But the LGPL does not require you make public the whole source of your app.

As someone working in in the commercial environment, the LGPL is fine, and my company has published its own LGPL code. It requires a little care in keeping LGPL code separate from in-house code, but is no problem at link time.

The full GPL, however, is untouchable. I have no problem with that - it is designed to achieve a certain effect, at a certain cost. It achieves what it set out to do, and pays the cost that was know up front.

This price is often too high, since it demands that the parts you link the library to become GPL, which in turn often encompasses the entire project.

It sounds a little like security by obscurity - but Mr. Liu seems to know his local competition. Now who would want to force feed the GPL to Mr. Liu because "all software must be free"?

Someone that bought the device and wants to add some new functionality or fix something in what they own. This is exactly the same situation that started the whole Free Software movement. Stallman merely wanted to fix a printer driver.

It's a bit disingenuous to say that the FSF doesn't care what license you use, when clearly, they care very much. [gnu.org]

Your link isn't a page of recommended licenses, by the way, it's a list of licenses with comments on their compatibility with the GPL.

The FSF has an agenda, and are willing to use threat of legal force to advance it. You may like their goals and there's nothing illegal about what they do, but any attempt to frame them as something different is not quite accurate.

The GP isn't talking about taking a piece of GPL code and removing the GPL, he's talking about licensing the code BSD, or other free use license. Comparing GPL favourably to vanilla copyright is not only an easy comparison, it's way off topic.

How is this payment to the original author? Notwithstanding if I provide a service instead of a product, then I never have to release anything... but even if I release a product in a niche market, say controllers in medical hardware, using a hypothetical modified linux kernel. I need to make the source for the modified kernel available to my customers, which they are free to redistribute, but the greater linux kernel community has no such right to the source unless they purchase one of the machines. Unless I voluntarily give back the code, or someone wants to pay me for my time by buying one of my machines, the original author never sees any of my changes.

The number of times I see comments saying that the GPL means people have to give back. This is not, and has never been the case.

So, how much can you trust open source software? Can you be sure it isn't infringing someone's copyright? The answer is usually no, unless you wrote it yourself.

As a developer, I will never release software under the GPL, but I will release software under actually free licenses like BSD or Apache. Of course, this means that I need to avoid using GPL libraries, because they do not give me the freedom to do what I require with the result of my own effort. Now in your world, this seems to be getting something for nothing, but in my world, it means I am being unreasonably restricted in a way that that would be unimaginable under any other license. Of course, if I find and fix a bug in the non-GPL library that I use, then I will naturally contribute the patch back to the project, and be happy that I could be of help. The GPL library gets no such support from me because I won't use it (if I have any choice).

Just to sum up, I find it completely unreasonable for a GPL library author to request me to release my entire application just because I make use of a supposedly free library. Even the "evil" closed-source commercial proprietary world would rarely put such a restriction on use of a library, and they wouldn't be as brazen as to say they're doing you a favour at the same time.

Now, as someone who moans about the GPL, do I still fit into your world as someone who wants something for nothing?

...except this is all one big fantasy.

So the whole issue is a big fat red herring. The vast majority of
all libraries are licenced with the library/lesser version of the
GPL so as to specifically avoid this problem. This is why there
can be a version of Oracle for Linux or some game from EA.

The "problem" doesn't really exist.

People are trying to ignore what's actually happening so that they
can make up some bogus argument.

Once again we have the crux of the anti-GPL whining as such: "why can't I hijack someone else's code".

It invariably happens that some whiner redefines "the freedom to set
the license on their code" as "the freedom to take someone else's work
and treat it as their own exclusive personal private property".

I judge the free software movement by the rantings [gnu.org] of its founder. I think it's safe to assume that his views are more representative than yours.

My definition of a schoolyard radical is somebody who loves elaborate social theories, but has no ability to apply them outside academia. RMS is a classic case: his GNU OS (the original "free" software project) has been under development for 27 years, with no end in sight. Yes, big chunks of it are incorporated in Linux, but the fact remains that RMS doesn't know how to see a big software project to completion. Like all schoolyard radicals, he never has to acknowledge his failure because he lives in the academic world, away from economic reality.

RMS's theories appeal to the same mindset that bought into the "fuck you I'll do what I want" brand of libertarianism that became alll the rage during the 80s. That mindset has just recently shown its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. RMS had one good idea: that voluntary cooperation was a better model for shared projects than the traditional committee approach. Others have taken this idea and done great things with it. RMS deserves some credit for that, but from his point of view it's almost an accidental outcome.

Yes, there are some companies who use the GPL with varying degrees of success and for a variety of reasons. The article is showing that there are many companies that choose to explicitly avoid the use of the GPL for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the very reasons that those other companies choose the GPL!!! The FORCED distribution of source code to modified GPL projects means just what the article says, it's a serious limitation for the business and loss of revenue potential. That's fine for some but not for most.

It's not about stirring FUD at all. It's about educating people that the GPL isn't right for many.

In my company we have no fear of USING a GPLed program or even of shipping it with our software. What we do not do is commit lots of time and money developing an existing GPL program and giving OUR changes away for free. Sure we'll change a line or twenty if needed to fix a bug or add a simple command line option we need for example, but we'll not put in any effort to develop it further. For serious updates we prefer to maximize our profit potential so we do prefer the other actually free licenses.

When shipping and using a GPLed program in your software make sure that you keep it contained in a GPL Virus Containment Condom so that it can't infect your own software! You do this by keeping it a separate program or by putting it into a separate program if you're linking to a library. Often a command line program is one of the best forms to wrap libraries in so that you can access it without being contaminated by it.

Now you might not like the way that I think or write about the GPL but it's not FUD, it's the reality of how my company and it's people hold the GPL in low regard and as a danger to our financial endeavors.

So choose your software licenses carefully for it can have a real world impact and the GPL can destroy your business if you're not careful.