Leaving the GPL Behind 543
olddotter points out a story up at Yahoo Tech on companies' decisions to distance themselves from the GPL. "Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. 'Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD,' he says. '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,' says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
Control freak (Score:5, Interesting)
Editor's note: InfoWorld tried to interview Richard Stallman, who runs the Free Software Foundation that created and manages the GPL, on this issue, but he demanded control of what we published, so we declined.
I LOLed.
Commercial != Proprietary (Score:1, Interesting)
"...one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
How can there be people yet that confuse the terms? Repeat with me: GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly, GPL license is commercial-friendly. (I can sell the software, sell services... in the end, commercial revenue). Didn't you want to say "proprietary" instead?
Re:Lost the point (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't claim copyright, the just want something in return. You use my code, I get to use your code. A simple barter system. You don't like the deal, don't use the code.
Re:Control freak (Score:5, Interesting)
RMS actually makes a distinction between different types of information and how free it needs to be. At one of his talks he discussed 3 categories:
1) works of practical use (educational materials, software tools, etc):
- should be free (GPL)
2) works of testimony (what people experienced or believe):
- republishing with modification is misrepresentation,
- commercial use covered by existing copyright
3) works of art and entertainment:
- commercial use requires permission, personal use is fine
His position is nuanced, not stupid. I actually think the distinction is too difficult to make and it is best to error on the side of freedom, but there are certainly some tricky "moral rights" or artistic integrity issues for categories 2 and 3 with GPL-style freedom.
Re:Control freak (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm, I suppose according to RMS the parent post is messing with his work of testimony. I'm gunna claim fair use while I still have some rights left. :)
Re:Control freak (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with his worldview is that it ignores one very important thing: artists have to eat, too. Take computer games, for example (and as a game developer who wants to bring more than bland oatmeal to the table, I very much do consider it art, but if you don't, entertainment works too). The GPL causes a cost-zero situation because anyone can, and if your product is good enough will, undercut anything you can do to generate revenue.
Sell copies of the game? Well, "personal use" includes giving copies away to everyone, so unless you're selling that first copy for a million bucks, you're going to lose your shirt. (Please don't give me that tired fucking bullshit about "well don't release it until people donate the amount you want," it sounds great if you discount that nobody will actually donate in significant numbers.)
Advertisements in the game to recoup your investment? Well, they have the code, so bye-bye ads and bye-bye revenue.
MMO? All your code's out there, enjoy those free-to-play ad-free private servers killing what little market share you can scrape up.
I can buy the argument, though I disagree heartily with it, that the GPL is useful for low-level tools--operating systems, userlands, etcetera. "Information freedom" is the fastest way to killing the software industries that many people derive a lot of enjoyment from, though, and it's not like you'll be getting Half-Life 2 out of an open source project any time soon.
Re:Control freak (Score:3, Interesting)
I am curious as to where this is coming from. I've interviewed Richard Stallman for interviews before, and while he set me straight on "open source vs. Free Software" terminology issues, he never expressed displeasure with the result. It wouldn't surprise me if he's been burned by interviewers many, many times in the past ... but refusing to answer any questions seems counterproductive. Then again, the assertion that he "demanded control of what we published" could just be B.S. and a misinterpretation of what he actually asked for; I'd like to find out the truth.
Re:Control freak (Score:1, Interesting)
> artists have to eat, too
So private uncommercial sharing has to stay criminalized just _in order_ artists can earn money from their art? Why do they _have_ to live from their art? Just because someone says so? Cant they just do something else not based on enforcement of a artificial scarcity (copyright) and do their art as a hobby in their free time, like they did for thousands and thousands of years before copyright?
Do we as a society at large really want to support criminalizing our fellow filesharers just in order to enable a certain activity (art) to be performed at a professional, for-profit level? I know the industry wants that, but do _we_, the democratic majority, really want this?
Re:Yup, beware of fascists... they are over THERE! (Score:2, Interesting)
If you invent the knife and then tell me I can only use it if I don't draw blood, why give it to me? I can decide if I am fighting off a wild beast to save my children or carving art with it.
Perhaps I think it is the wild beast's right to eat your children. Would you still rather carve your art with a splintered rock? The point at hand, however, is not what you may or may not use the knife for; it's how you can modify it, and if you need to show other people how to do that if they think your modifications are useful.
If I come up with an easier way for making knives, and show you how - I'm sharing my idea with you, for whatever reason; but let's just say that in whatever society or tribe this is, we live better if more people can have knives. What would piss me off, in this situation, is if you came up with a way of strapping my knives to a stick to fight with less danger to yourself; but wouldn't show me how.
If you then start selling your 'my-knife on a stick' (okay, let's call it a spear) because you can make knives easily using my process; but hide how the knife is reliably attached, you've created a competitive advantage for yourself based on my work.
Lets say that a third person comes up with a stronger, lighter stick. He wants to put a knife on it, to make Spear 2.0, and I show him how to make the knives; but he doesn't know how to attach them. I don't know how, either. In fact nobody does; but you.
Now, we have the opportunity to make a better weapon for everyone, but nobody wants to ask you how to bind the knife to the stick, because you're likely to rip off the new stick idea as well, and you probably wouldn't show us the right way, anyhow, because you want to be rewarded for other people's work.
The rest of this really hinges on you. You could share the information, and we'd all live better because we'd be the best armed tribe in the region. There'd still be work making the spears; and since you've been doing this the longest you can probably still make the most money or whatever if you want.
You can derive whatever moral from this you like; but the upshot is that ultimately we're going to rally the tribe to snatch you in your sleep and torture the information out of you with blunt sticks and short knives; err, I mean, get everybody to use a system of interoperating open source software components.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth (Score:3, Interesting)
In many cases they could also use the LGPL (provided they can cleanly separate the proprietary and open components), and I have no idea why they do not.
Because the LGPL means you have to constant work within a legal framework that it sets down, whereas BSD licences give developers the freedom to ignore the legal implications of what they are doing and just get on with their job. Laywers are expensive and to constantly have to consult specialist legal consul just to ensure you are on the right side of the LGPL quickly pushes a projects costs up. In the commercial world the BSD licence gives the most freedom to the original creator of the project, yet still lets outside parties contribute.
You might argue that outside would never contribute to a BSD project as there is the possibility their work could be used in closed source projects but that is not the case since plenty of people do. Some people might be put off, but that is a trade off for having the freedom to adopt a different licencing scheme in future without having to trace every contributer to your project and get them to sign a waver saying they will not enforce the GPL over the code they comitted to your project.
Re:RMS disallows free use of his words (Score:2, Interesting)
You could put it like this : his words are open, so he wanted the article to have the same openness so he could correct obvious mistakes. So RMS open source words are viral, infecting articles with their openness :-)
I never could decide wether he was a genius or a nutjob, so I figure he's probably both.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth (Score:5, Interesting)
If TCP/IP was originally GPLed, the protocol would probably not have taken off. BSD licensing (or public domain) promotes standards propogation. GPL encourages reinvention of the wheel, when someone decides that (heaven forbid) they want to be paid for their work (be it huge code additions, or just packaging up free code in a nicer package, or whatever).
Me? I'd much rather there was freely available BSD code for whatever problems have already been solved. Commercial products would be free to implement this well tested, standards compliant code and provide additional features that others may or may not be interested in. Those not interested in paying could take the base, well tested code and write their own pretty interface (or whatever) for it.
Re:Control freak (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
We don't. The free market will determine whether our skills are valuable or not, and if they aren't we either adapt or die. No need to bring state-granted monopolies into the equation.
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"?
So? There's plenty of forms of both art and practical works that are simply too expensive to be done in a copyrighted world as well, but you don't seem to care about that. No decision is without consequences, and few have no downsides.
Besides, I don't see what's so special about Half-Life 2 that we need to ensure its existence even at the cost of our freedoms.
Re:Lost the point (Score:1, Interesting)
Then again, some folks want to use a tiny bit of code for processing XML files or handling a networking connection in a way that will work on all of their target platforms within an enormous body of code they've had to write by hand which does far more than just send generic packets or read a single data format.
Some folks would be OK with sharing the modifications to that code that were required to make it work with their program, and even the interface used to make it work within their code including the memory structures and processing functions.
However, they don't want to give their entire product away for free because they used a library which used to be delivered under those terms, was switched to GPL, then security vulnerabilities were found which will never be patched within the LGPL versions which make it unethical to use the original code without fixing the vulnerability in the internals. Then those folk are righteously fucked, as any bug fixes will essentially require use of code that is now licensed under a different license which will now infect the rest of their product.
Too bad for them? That seems to be the general idea. But not everybody has the luxury of being able to give away their code for free to the entire world (and, in fact, it may be illegal for them to do so).
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth (Score:3, Interesting)
For instance an older product I was on wanted to use internationalization. The GNU libintl and gettext programs seemed very good for this purpose, and it actually is. The tools can all be used off line to create and manipulate the databases and they're very handy and solve a tricky problem. But the library we had to statically link to for looking up strings was GPLd. I would have taken a too long to reverse engineer an equivalent library (even longer if you try to use a chinese wall). Without that library all those external FSF tools were pointless. But there was BSD code for the same library; someone else had reinvented the wheel and made their work available for all, and that library was maintained.
Whereas if I had reinvented the wheel, I seriously doubt the company would have let me make it available to others even though we weren't a software house. I definitely would have had no time at all to support or maintain it for others.