We Don't Need the GPL Anymore 919
jpkunst writes "In a lengthy interview with Eric S. Raymond by Federico Biancuzzi at O'Reilly's onlamp.com, ESR defends his position that 'Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it.'" From the article: "I don't think the GPL is the principal reason for Linux's success. Rather, I believe it's because in 1991 Linus was the first person to find the right social architecture for distributed software development. It wasn't possible much before then because it required cheap internet; and after Linux, most people who might otherwise have founded OS projects found that the minimum-energy route to what they wanted was to improve Linux. The GPL helped, but I think mainly as a sort of social signal rather than as a legal document with teeth."
Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep forgetting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I keep forgetting (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I keep forgetting (Score:5, Funny)
Better get everyone to agree on that standard before you publish it. Otherwise you'll have MS people putting curly braces, Linux people putting brackets, and Mac people using Floating Hearts or something...
*ducks*
Re:I keep forgetting (Score:5, Funny)
He's right, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
And ESR would have another chance to get it right.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Interesting)
If what you said were true why didn't Microsoft take say FreeBSD and do the same thing? It's BSD Licensed, UNIX based and a pretty solid system.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
I am kinda curious who retains that contract. I imagine it follows the os portion of old-SCO and would now be in the care of McBride & Co.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Informative)
While shipping NT 3.1 Microsoft was under pressure to add TCP/IP so they bought a commerically available stack rather than write it themselves. This commercial offering was a BSD derivative -- completely legally. For NT4 Microsoft rewrote the stack substantially, retaining old bits for backward compatibility. If this is 'stealing' from BSD, we should just scrap the BSD licence since it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
What if Microsoft incorporated more open software- would that be a good thing, or a bad thing?
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is good because if you improve GPL software, like M$ did with the BSD TCP stack, you must give the improvements back to the community. M$ kept their improvements to themselves, legally and according to the BSD license. M$ weren't stealing. They just want to take and not give back.
Not just "improvements". (Score:3, Interesting)
This is far more difficult if you have have release the code for that "extend" under the same license that you got the original code.
If everyone can implement those same extensions, under the same license, then "extinguish" becomes far more difficult.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Hi. Are you twelve? Do you realize it makes you look like a total yutz when you do that?
You had a good point, but you lost me with the dollar signs. In writing circles, it's called a "roadblock." Try to avoid it.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with you. More importantly (and far more influentually) the market disagrees with you. Ask IBM, HP, Intel, SGI, Disney, Pixar, Google--I could go on, but I won't--how much value GPL software has. Seems to me that the value of the Linux kernel alone is measured in billions--if not tens or even hundreds of billions--of dollars.
Beyond that, the comparison of GPL code to socialism (a comparison designed to equate the GPL with an idea many consider to be evil) is that the GPL is entirely opt-in. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a socialist or communist nation will find that the products of their labor are forcibly taken and given to others "more deserving" or who "need it more" with the alternative being prison or death. On the other hand, engaging in the development of--or using--software licensed under the GPL is entirely voluntary. RMS is not going to come to your house wearing jackboots and demand you use GCC.
Let's not beat around the bush--companies and individuals HAVE been screwed by productizing GPL software and finding either someone else doing the same, or getting threatening letters from the copyright owners demanding source code. To this, I say: they COULD have elected to develop from scratch, but instead opted to use someone else's work. Exactly why would a rational person expect to be able to take someone else's labor and profit from it without remuneration? THAT sounds more like a socialist state to me, while the GPL's quid-pro-quo sounds quite capitalist in comparison.
Take a tip from the IETF (Score:5, Insightful)
Software monoculture leads to catastrophic failures in a connected world. Look how Ultrix, which had a (somewhat) independent code base, was immune to the Cornell worm when most of the Unices dropped off the Internet nearly simultaneously. Would it have been better to have every box on the Internet die? Or was it better for the VMS, MVS, and Ultrix machines to stay on-line?
Re-inventing the wheel is not always a bad thing. Your wheel can have cleats and sipes the old one didn't have, and still be bolt-on compatible.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple did simply embrace and extend BSD. Nobody seemed to mind, and Apple ended up with a rather good OS.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:4, Interesting)
NeXT took 4.3BSD and Mach 2.5, and built a kernel which used Mach to provide a hardware abstraction layer and key services (e.g. threads), BSD to provide a UNIX personality, and their own driver model. They licensed Display PDF from Adobe and built their AppKit on top of it. They created a BSD-derived userland with several of the BSD utilities. They added support for Objective-C to gcc, although this wasn't particularly useful without an Objective-C runtime - NeXT had one, and GNU now has one as well.
Apple bought NeXT (or NeXT bought Apple for a negative amount), stripped out the old 4.3BSD code and replaced it with 4.4BSD lites 2 code to make Rhapsody. They took some userland tools from NetBSD and created a Mac look and feel. A bit later, they updated more of the BSD code with bits from FreeBSD, which gave them a more modern kernel.
Saying that they did `simply embrace and extend BSD' is a gross oversimplification. You might like to compare the Darwin kernel source to any BSD kernel at some point and see how different it is. Sun (and other UNIX vendors) did simply embrace and extend (and extend a lot in some cases) BSD in the early days of commercial UNIX, although modern Solaris is a lot more SysV than BSD.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and all the other operating systems based on the BSD license were not made obsolete by Microsoft, even if they do use some BSD code. The introduction of BSD code into Microsoft Windows did not magically make it a superior operating system. Neither would Linux code in Windows.
Your entire argument is a straw man.
Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud (Score:5, Interesting)
This whole thread is rediculous.
The OSI (open source initiative - a california nonprofit org, funded largely by industry) & members including ESR
has always been at odds with
the FSF (Free Software Foundation - a massachusetts nonprofit organization, funded & staffed largely by academia) & members including RMS regarding free/open software. Each compete for donations, developers, mindshare, etc just like any other two organizations.
Please take anything the OSI says about the GPL, and anything the FSF says about the CDDL with a large grain of salt rubbed in the wound.
(opinionated rant: To ESR and the rest of the OSI - I don't give a damn how much Sun paid you from their Microsoft settlement to get the pattent-encumbered CDDL approved, please stop bashing the FSF and trying to divide and conquor the F/OSS community)
Re:Silly OSI vs FSF marketing fud (Score:4, Funny)
OSI = West Coast
FSF = East Coast
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
But if they then want to implement the new enhanced features added to the closed source version, then they do have to reinvent the wheel again.
Oh for Pete's sake! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sheesh.
Re:Oh for Pete's sake! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh for Pete's sake! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course we can't.
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He's right, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He's right, of course (Score:4, Insightful)
What if the original maintainer has given up, and it needs a lot of porting to work on modern systems? With BSD software, where's the incentive to make the "new" version open source?
GPL Teeth? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is what would happen if someone infringing upon the GPL ever refused to settle:
(Paraphrased from a talk given by Ebden Moglen [wikipedia.org]. I don't remember which it was, but I think it was one of the ones linked from that article.)
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Interesting)
LGPL is fine. Dual licensed open source products are fine where you can pay the developer for a license other than compliance with the GPL.
There are lots of reasons that companies and government entities don't want to expose all their source to the GPL including security considerations, prot
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternativly they just don't read it properly.
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GPLed program.
Those companies try to make you believe they have this huge pile of code and they add a little bit of GPL code. It usually is the other way around: they use huge amounts of GPL code (e.g. an entire kernel) and add a little bit off their own.
Jeroen
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Informative)
No, more often than not, the GPL software is a small component of a larger system (i.e. code to handle graphics formats). The GPL'ed code is not changed or improved, but somehow the communitiy expects to get all the other irrelevant code for free. This is what turns companies off to it.
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GP
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to open everything. Just the stuff that is a derrivative of the GPLed program.
And even that's not entirely accurate. If you take GPL'd code, modify it, and use it in house, you don't have to release it. The ONLY time that you'd have to release code is when you're distributing a derivative work. For example, if you modify code, and then turn around and sell it, when you sell it, you also have to provide a copy of the source to the people who buy it. If you release it for download, you have to release your changes. That's it.
~Wx
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since even without explicit permission from the Copyright holder, the Copyright act _does_ grant unlimited permission to copy a copyrighted work for personal use. It's the act of distributing in the first place that negates the notion of personal use, and that requires permission from the Copyright holder to do. The GPL grants said permission to all people that agree to its terms. If you don't agree, then all you have
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:4, Informative)
The company I work for origionally had a CTO that was freaking out about GPL'd software.
It came to pass that he was simply acting that way because of the FUD and scaremongering that the MS rep he was buddy-buddy with was feeding him on a regular basis. After his "demands" and we presented a proposal for rewriting and purchasing everything needed to eliminate all GPL software in the business plus a letter from the Company's law firm telling him that the GPL is 100% harmless in every aspect unless we are shipping GPL code as or in a product.
The whining was still there, finance refused to approve a 2.2 million dollar budget line to buy all new MS and other commercial software as well as hiring programmers to rewrite from scratch some of the other solutions we rely on for revinue.
the GPL is not "dangerous" or "viral" and also is not scary in any way, shape, or form to anyone but someone trying to steal code, get something for nothing or are underinformed or relying on lies/bad information.
We proved it to a CTO that was pigheaded, must have his way, and trusts his personal friends more than the experts he hires.
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GPL Teeth? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting pretty sick of this argument.
Any professional developer* worth anything will ask the following questions when investigating a library for use in a product:
It's not Rocket Surgery - I do this as a matter of course when evaluating libraries at work.
It is Job #1. Not Job #DoItAfterWeShip.
Sure, the GPL might scare people off using a library, but then...so what? If they don't want to share, then they write the code themselves. Their choice. If they don't want to share, I'm not saying that's 'evil', just that they don't get the benefit of the free software someone else produced on the condition that others share too. I myself have been in both positions, and whether you choose to use GPL software for a particular task is specific to what you are doing. You make a choice and you move on.
Whining about the license stopping you use a library is like whining about the price of a commercial library stopping you using the library. In either case it doesn't do you any good, and to paraphrase Linus, whoever wrote the code gets to decide the license and the cost, and nobody else gets to complain.
But this "we used GPL'd code without doing even the most basic license checks on our libraries, and now we have to release our code! no fair!" stuff is just bullshit. They fucked up. They're idiots. End of story.
As for 'holding developers back', it's a bit like calling out a roadside recovery service when you break down in your car, and getting upset when they tell you they will charge you. "You won't tow me unless I pay you? If I don't agree to your terms, I'll have to do it without you?! You're holding me baaaaaaaack, man!"
* Or any developer worth anything, come to that.
GPL is very much needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GPL is very much needed (Score:3, Informative)
BSD is a great example of what doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider Sun Microsystems, whose SunOS operating system was based on BSD. What did they give back? Other than a few bug fixes early on, nothing.
Ultrix, from Digital Equipment, was BSD-based. Little to nothing came back to BSD from DEC.
Remember OSF/1, which was based on Mach/BSD? How much of their work went back? Next to nothing.
Microsoft used the BSD TCP stack as the basis of their TCP stack. What did they give back? Nothing.
FTP software based their whole product suite on the BSD codebase. How much came back? Nothing.
I don't know of any major corporation which has made significant donations back to the BSD core. There may be the rare exception, but the bulk of corporate back-donations has been some bug fixes. That has left the development almost entirely to individual developers or very small groups, and thereby limited how much could be done.
Lots of people think of the GPL as a "communist" license, but in fact it is BSD that is the free-for-all. The BSD license attaches no value to what it is licensing, and as a result you a software "tragedy of the commons" where everyone is happy to use it but almost nobody ever gives anything back. I know that there are going to be people who vehemently disagree with what I'm going to say, but: It has been my observation that the BSD source base has been relatively stagnant over more than a decade. If you look at what a modern BSD provides and compare it to what BSD 4.3 provided you'll find little that is new. A similar comparison with any major commercial UNIX will yield a great many such features (like working SMP support, journalled filesystems, NUMA support, logical volume management, realtime support, etc).
The GPL, on the other hand, leverages the fact that the source base is valuable. It is not a "give away" as so many people claim but rather an intellectual property trade very much like the patent sharing agreements so common in the proprietary world. While businesses would rather get something for nothing, if what they're getting in trade is valuable enough it is an incentive to give up some of their own rights.
If you think of the GPL as an intellectual property collective agreement you have the right idea. The thing about that kind of agreement is that the more IP that is covered by it the more valuable the collective becomes -- and therefore the more likely others are to join it.
In Linux' case the source base is exceptionally valuable at this point, worth literally billions of dollars, and for the better part of a decade has been receiving significant code donations from corporations. Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support? All of them. For something like a decade corporations have been making major code donations back to the Linux codebase and it has advanced tremendously as a result. While Linux certainly has its rough edges it has seriously outgrown its tinkerer beginnings.
So Raymond could not be more wrong about this point. Oh, I agree that the development structure that Torvalds set up was a principal contributor to its success. To be sure, one of the major limitations in the BSD codebase has been the reluctance of the BSD principals to accept code they didn't write. But BSD has branched enough times that it has also seen conditions similar to what Linux enjoyed and it still never turned the corner.
What made Linux win was simply that large corporations had to give to get, and the more times that happens the more likely it becomes.
Re:BSD is a great example of what doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
You ditch the GPL and Linux will fragment just like UNIX did. Companies like HP, IBM, Novell and the now Wall Street obsessed Red Hat would start doing all their work on proprietary branches in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage and "differentiate" their product which is exactly what all the proprietary Unix flavors did. "Differentiation" was the death knell for proprietary UNIX. They are all dead and dieing due to the fragmentation of resources and applications, while Linux is going strong.
Maybe we don't need ESR any more. Some of his lunatic rants make people nervous about using open source.
Exactly. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, it is notable that WindRiver dropped BSD in favour of Linux, which may be because other companies have to be on a level playing field in that realm.
I don't believe one license is necessarily better than the other - OpenBSD probably couldn't have the level of assurance it does under the GPL, as it would be too mutable. On the other hand,
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BSD is a great example of what doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm well aware of his point, it has been made ad-infinitum over the last two decades. I've been in the middle of commercial products that had to deal with both licenses and, for sure, it's easier to deal with BSD than
Re:BSD is a great example of what doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo!, Apple, and Pair Networks (in money) would probably argue against that.
The companies you mentioned probably use little if anything of the BSD code any longer.
I don't know of any major corporation which has made significant donations back to the BSD core. There may be the rare exception, but the bulk of corporate back-donations has been some bug fixes. That has left the development almost entirely to individual developers or very small groups, and thereby limited how much could be done.
Most companies hire contractors to contribute to the BSD's. You do not see many companies make big shows about it.
It has been my observation that the BSD source base has been relatively stagnant over more than a decade. If you look at what a modern BSD provides and compare it to what BSD 4.3 provided you'll find little that is new. A similar comparison with any major commercial UNIX will yield a great many such features (like working SMP support, journalled filesystems, NUMA support, logical volume management, realtime support, etc).
Remember the list of features modern UNIXen have that BSD doesn't? Did you notice how many of them Linux does support?
When will Linux support Soft Updates? When will Linux use sysctl() instead of
To be sure, one of the major limitations in the BSD codebase has been the reluctance of the BSD principals to accept code they didn't write.
Huh? That does not match to what happens within the BSD communities. Maybe, you are thinking about the Linux community?
"Open Source" is not for software freedom. (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's our responsibility to be good to corporations, even to the point of allowing them to take works out of the commons, because why? The corporations that complain the most about the GNU GPL (Apple and Microsoft, among others) are those that treat their users horribly by distributing programs the users aren't allowed to inspect, share, or modify. The progress the free software movement made before the open source movement existed (which was over a decade of work) happened largely without the direct i
RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually ESR misses the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
> NetBSD is a worthy project, but, let's face it,
> the fan base for it simply is not large enough to
> justify spending marketing effort to recruit them.
I agree that NetBSD is cool and appreciate all their hard work. It's allowed me to have a modern desktop on my Solaris 8 system at work without having root privileges. No Linux, not even Gentoo can claim to be able to do that.
That being said, the xBSDs were actually ahead of Linux in the late 1990s. The xBSDs were more widely deployed for enterprise systems. But Linux still overtook them. The initial fan base isn't really an issue.
It's also not the applications issue. NetBSD can pretty much run any app that's on Linux. There may be a bit lag (since the apps are developed on Linux most of the time and there's a bit of a porting effort), but the apps get there without too much time.
It's not the compile your own source code culture of the xBSDs since pkg_add supports binary packages, and Gentoo has more popularity than the xBSDs. There is also version of Debian for the xBSDs.
It's not even the kernel. A few years back, the BSD was superior in many ways, but Linux still outstripped it.
When all is said and done, there is only one key difference between Linux and BSD, the license. Companies like IBM don't mind GPLing their technology for the same reason TrollTech doesn't mind GPLing Qt....If anyone wants to use it in a commercial product, they have to pay IBM, TrollTech, Sleepycat, etc for the right to take the code prorietary. And although your competitors may have access to your source code, they can't do anything with it without releasing their changes so you can benefit from it. When a company GPLs their product, they haven't really given it away.
GPL is a quid pro quo license (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours). Businesses understand quid pro quo and use it every day as a means of getting things done.
BSD is a charity license. As far as businesses are concerned, charity is good, but business is business and the last thing you want to do is give charity to your competitors.
It's not politically correct to say this, but "it really is the license, stupid".
Re:Actually ESR misses the point. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have one word for you. kswapd
Pick a BSD, any one. Their virtual memory subsystem far outstrips the unstable mess that Linux's has been since at least 1998. VM ain't just swap, it's virtually every every single memory access you make in protected mode. And Linux, across kernel versions and distributions, has consistently made a dogs breakfast of it.
I am dealing with the kswapd issues
Linux popularity isn't from the GPL. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Actually ESR misses the point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Actually ESR misses the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Weather forecast (Score:5, Funny)
While we're at it... (Score:4, Insightful)
ESR on drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
The GPL is the one well-thought out licence, and AFAIK it's the only Free/Open-Source Software license ever to actually stand up in court.
ESR, shut the fuck up, you've done your good deeds, now don't start destroying it all just because you're not in the spotlight anymore.
Re:ESR on drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does Slashdot keep publishing his idiocies [slashdot.org]?
Re:ESR on drugs (Score:5, Funny)
You know they often get more mileage out of a provocative article than an informative one.
It's not the GPL that makes people nervous (Score:5, Insightful)
Other licenses are becoming more common (Score:4, Interesting)
Major projects like Apache, MySQL, X11, Perl, and PHP eschew the GPL in favor for homebrew alternatives, and while the GPL offers a single license for a disparate range of software.. I agree with ESR, and I believe that licensing of open source software may be better done in a simpler, less arcane way.
Re:Other licenses are becoming more common (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Other licenses are becoming more common (Score:3, Informative)
No sir. Perl [perl.org] and MySQL [mysql.com] are GPL'd.
Re:Other licenses are becoming more common (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl is either GPL'd or covered by Wall's Artistic License.
http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ [perl.org]
-1 Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
He's just sour he couldn't come up with the GPL in the first place. All he has done with his so-called "open source initiative" is try to steal the FSF's thunder. The guy is chronically jalous of RMS.
If not, he would acknowledge that the GPL is far more than the licence of Linux. Truth is, the GPL is the constitution of the Free Software movement. As such, it protects all software under it. Not just Linux.
Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
ESR is such a troll.
While I don't consider myself an ESR fan, reading TFA, I got the impression that the one doing the trolling was in fact the interviewer. IMHO his questions are constantly trying to sucker ESR into saying something stupid (more page views => more advertising revenue?), but this time ESR manages to keep his head cool and answers pretty rationally.
Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
sPh
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
KHTML isn't the biggest project out there, but it's in the top few % for size and complexity, I'd bet. Imagine what a private company could do to a smaller project.
Re:Counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, do, because this is a great example of where the GPL doesn't make any difference. Apple effectively forked KHTML (as near as I can tell, accidentally), but it was legal to do so under the GPL... they didn't need to do anything more than release the source code. Instead, in response, they opened up the CVS and the bug database. Not because the GPL forced them to, but because the chose to.
If KHTML had been under the BSDL, would Apple have taken it away completely? Legally, they could have, but they haven't done that for other open source components in Mac OS X... the source trees at opensource.apple.com and opendarwin.org include code under BSDL, APSL, GPL, and more.
AT&T took BSD code and forked it, and nobody cared until USL tried to shut down the open-source BSD... and that BSD code turned out to be just the lever that Berkeley needed to bring USL to heel.
Microsoft's using GPL code and BSD code in Interix, and that has neither let them "outperform" Cygwin nor forced Microsoft to open Interix one skerrick more. Microsoft's been using BSD code in Windows for years, but that same code was re-implemented in Linux... if the code had been GPLed, would Linux somehow be more outperforming BSD in the market, would NT have been less successful? Personally, I wish Microsoft had used more of the BSD stack rather than mostly borrowing userland tools, it would have made socket programming in Windows a lot easier... and more compatible.
So, over and over again, we see that it's not the license that matters, it's the attitude of the people using it.
The GPL doesn't stop you from forking the code base. The GPL doesn't stop different open source groups from forking the code base. The GPL doesn't stop groups using the same code base from developing functionally equivalent packages on top of that GPLed code. Heck, sometimes the only way to bring a code base forward is to fork and switch, and Nokia at least seems to think that's a great idea...
If they could truly go their own ways without Apple showing anything they did but KDE showing everything, I think it's pretty clear Apple could run ahead of KDE.
But instead, Apple is voluntarily choosing to take part on the open market of ideas to a far greater degree than any license commits them to. They could easily pull a Sveasoft and release source code grudgingly enough that KHTML would forever remain the junior fork.
What ESR's saying now is what BSD advocates have been saying for years. Companies that are interested in being productive partners will be productive partners no matter what license you use, and companies that aren't will find ways to stick to the letter of the license while completely gutting its spirit.
Ugh... no (Score:4, Insightful)
KHTML is NOT GPLed. It is under the LGPL. The names sound similar but this is a really, really serious distinction. The LGPL is much more loose and is a lot closer to BSD than GPL-- it basically says "you have to release changes you make to these files in this project, but you can take these files and dump it into something larger and you don't have to do anything to the rest of your project, so long as these files when taken as an independent unit still work". This means that changes and fixes to the LGPLed work must be contributed back, but additions, well, contributing those back are pretty much optional.
If KHTML had been GPLed, the entire Safari situation would have been different. For one thing, it very possibly wouldn't have happened. The GPL probably asks enough that Apple wouldn't have found it acceptable-- they're apparently OK with releasing source to WebCore or WebKit or whichever it is, but they probably wouldn't have been happy with having to open source Safari, or having to force any OS X developers linking against WebCore[Kit?], a system service, to open source. If KHTML had been GPLed Apple would have just gone and used their other option for a plug-in rendering engine, the mozilla/firefox project, which is available under the MPL (and soon the LGPL as well)-- which is even less restrictive than the LGPL from Apple's perspective.
But, let's hypothetically say KHTML had been GPLed and Apple had accepted this. What then? Well, then the situation vondo describes couldn't have occurred. Apple could have forked and written better code than the open source community, but that would be okay-- because they would have no control over their fork. I or you or anyone else in the world could have just downloaded safari.tar.gz, forked apple's fork, made one tiny improvement, and released it on the internet. Tada! The open source community has outdone Apple!
But that isn't an option here in real life. In real life, Apple's released WebKit/KHTML, but that's not a full product. It's a rendering engine. It can't really do anything by itself.
And what this means is that even though Apple's released their source, the Open Source community can't keep up with them. You could technically take WebKit and stuff it into Konqueror (and it would be interesting to try, I'm suprised no one has yet). But this would require some integration work, plus it still wouldn't at all stand up to Safari due to the value added by the parts of Safari which remain proprietary.
So while the LGPL, a less-"pure" license than the GPL, lead to a commercial use of an LGPLed library which is beneficial to the commercial user, beneficial to the open source project, and beneficial to others [slashdot.org]-- this is the exact thing ESR is trying to encourage!-- use of the LGPL in this case has still created an effective barrier to the open source product being as useful or successful as the commercial project which is using its code. RMS, were he here and someone had let him off his leash, would probably point out that this is one of the reasons you want to be using the GPL instead of the LGPL or BSD or MPL licenses in the first place!
Re:Ugh... no (Score:4, Informative)
What parts are those, precisely? I don't know of any parts of Safari which remain proprietary that are any kind of barrier to competition, or that are technically difficult to implement. Safari is a very thin shell around Webkit, and there are at least two open-source replacement shells (Sunrise Browser and Shiira).
use of the LGPL in this case has still created an effective barrier to the open source product being as useful or successful as the commercial project which is using its code.
I'm completely unable to understand how you would come to this conclusion. Safari itself only uses standard Mac OS X APIs, so Apple could have open-sourced all of Safari (and Dashboard, but that came later) without open-sourcing any other part of OS X, no matter what open-source license KHTML or Webkit was released under.
About all that placing KHTML (and thus Webkit itself) under the GPL instead of the LGPL might have done would be to keep Apple from using Webkit in Mail in Tiger, and make some third party products on OS X use one of the other HTML rendering packages instead. The only program I can think of that I use, that uses Webkit, is Adium. And that's already GPLed.
So, Apple has in fact released all the code that is needed for a third party (be that the KHTML team or Nokia) to duplicate "the commercial project which is using its code", just as they would as if KHTML had been released under the GPL. Apple could have created the kind of barrier that you're talking about, but they chose not to.
Unless there's some magic Safari goodness that programs like Shiira are missing (and I doubt that, Shiira already does more than Safari) I'm completely at a loss to understand what you're getting at here.
Re:Counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
"Yes, do, because this is a great example of where the GPL doesn't make any difference."
/does/ make a difference, although it's not obvious - the GPL kept Apple from legally sucking up source code and not releasing it per the license. The GPL sets a minimum standard of behavior for companies. The GPL may have started as a way to subvert the system and give the code freedom, but it's evolved into a set of legal protections. That's the point Raymond seems to be missing.
I think it actually
"So, over and over again, we see that it's not the license that matters, it's the attitude of the people using it."
/and/ the attitude that matter.
If you're talking about companies who choose to go over and above what the license requires, then sure, I agree with you. But for every company like Apple, there could be a dozen others who take the code and don't give back their source. For those companies, it's the license
I don't think forking is the issue of greatest concern. You're right that companies likely to contribute will do so regardless of license...when they don't, though, at least the license holders have some way of defending themselves in court through the GPL.
Re:Counterpoint (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL did no such thing. You can't say "this license or law stopped X, Y, or Z" unless there's a likelihood of X, Y, or Z happening. There's a law against my pulling out a gun and shooting my boss, but you can't say "the law kept me from shooting my boss" unless you had reason to believe that I would have done that if the law didn't stop me.
Yes, there are companies for which this is true. There are, for example,
Without GPL were doomed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont even think for a minute that the world is so "well-adapted" and would play nice if we took away GPL.
Let me take http://www.blender3d.org/ [blender3d.org] as an example. The community bought this excellent piece of 3d software free from the grasp of shareholders and re-licensed it to GPL.
Thanks to that, its relatively safe from its actual competitors such as Discreet(AutoDesk), Alias etc. This program is so powerful that it actually can compete with the big ones, I know... I use it commercially today to develop artworks for ad-campaings that bring food on the table, but the GPL license made it affordable for me to get a "start" on my own instead of having to invest thousands of dollars into expensive 3d-software.
The big companies see us as potential customers as long as Blender where inferior to their software, but now as it has grown bigger...and more companies/personal users etc. are using it...
Dont go thinking theyll play it nice forever...losing customers theyll look for an "edge" somewhere...such as a license infringement...maybe code or functions that are equal to theirs SUE SUE SUE!
Darl McBride anyone?
We need GPL, now more than ever!
Naive Optimism (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone's been hanging around too many honest engineers. This statement grossly underestimates the selfishness of people and corporations as well as the impact of a strong legal system. Look, I'm not saying the GPL is the only important factor but I can't logically see linux existing in anywhere near its current form without it. Even if most individuals would respect other people's work (and that's retardedly naive) some people and most corporations will not. In fact, corporate management has a fiduciary duty to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders and they're under a lot of pressure to do it. There are MUCH easier (and proven) ways to make high margin profits with software than the open source model. Without legal teeth to enforce keeping software in the community it simply wouldn't happen. It's pretty safe to assume that nearly all people and companies act in their short term self interest first and foremost. Always. No exceptions.
Re:Naive Optimism (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporate management has a fiduciary duty to maximize stakeholder wealth in the long term. Maintaining acceptable profit levels is only one aspect of that goal. Companies that go all-out to maximize return to shareholders find that their business model is unsustainable and they burn out.
Contrary to your assertions regarding short term self interest, most people engage in long term planning and understand the risks of sacrificing long term returns for short term profits. Around the world most public com
If this were true... (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's clear that the reason most open-source developers are inspired to work on Linux is the knowledge that their work won't be commercially exploited.
That's not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Not having the slightest idea what the GPl requires. (See countless "They don't have downloadable source code on their website! GPL violation!!!" stories here.)
2) Declaring violations of "the spirit of the GPL" that pretty much cover anything "the community" decides it deserves and isn't getting.
The recent Safari-KHTML brouhaha indicates why companies face risk from even the most careful use of others' GPL code.
Re:That's not the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
That's precisely the point. There are two sets of "rules" here* -- what the GPL actually requires and what "the community" thinks the rules ought to be. There is no real question that Apple was in full compliance with the licensing te
Awww.... the GPL makes you nervous? (Score:3, Funny)
Talent and time are the only things holding FOSS back.
superiority of open source (Score:4, Insightful)
Much has been made of the difference in philosophy of the "free software" and "open source" camps (too much, perhaps); this is a pretty clear statement of Eric's perspective.
Contributors! Contributors! (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of people already wrote GPLed software before Linux was released for that and other reasons. I wonder how feature-rich Linux distributions would be if they accepted only BSD-licensed software. Even people who do serious kernel work might want to get paid if someone uses their kick-ass algorithms in a closed-source OS.
I have to disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to disagree with Eric. Certainly open-source would be more widely adopted if it didn't use the GPL, but it wouldn't be more successful. A lot of it's success is because of features that've gotten added over time as people needed them. The GPL is what enforces that add-back. Without it individuals would probably contribute back but corporate-sponsered development would've probably been locked up on the grounds of "protecting our precious IP". We would've lost a lot of features, and we would've seen a splintering like we did with Unix itself as companies fought to make their own subtly-incompatible versions of software to insure their customers stayed locked in and buying from them. We saw Microsoft try this with the non-GPL'd Kerberos software, and the only thing that prevented it was MIT getting nasty about trademarks. Without the GPL this would be the norm, not an exceptional example.
IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Linspire, Xandros? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, in other words (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL has become the most popular free software license because it enforces a contract where you can't take without giving back. This may not be what you want for some programs, particularly programs which are platforms, such as Apache or Perl. But for most cases it is. It sends an important message to the people contributing to a GPLed project-- it says, your contributions won't be wasted, if people use this you benefit. It gives you a reason to contribute rather than boredom of philanthropy.
Meanwhile the only people who would be made "nervous" by the presence of the GPL are the people who want, or think they might want in the future, to take from open source software without giving equally in return. Think about that for a moment.
I tend to release my personal code under the LGPL because I feel the GPL is too restrictive, and I care more about the things I release being useful than I care about knowing I'll get something back. But that doesn't mean I'm going to deny how important the GPL is. The GPL made the open source development model as we know it today, with corporate and private interests sharing resources toward a common goal, possible-- we may be at a point now where lots of companies are contributing to open source purely voluntarily, but this is at least partly because open source is "hip" right now. There was a point in the past where it wasn't "hip" and companies sometimes had to be made to contribute, by holding the "you have to contribute to take" aspect of the GPL heads. There will be a point in the future where open source is not "hip" the way it is today. When that point comes, good luck convincing companies to contribute to your Apache licensed projects rather than just taking. It won't work all the time.
Picking the right license for the job (Score:3, Interesting)
BSD-like for code that either isn't terribly interesting or important enough to care about it being embraced and extended or code that represents a canonical implementation of a proposed standard that it is hoped will be widely adopted. Yes, even by Microsoft.
GPL-like for interesting and unique code that presents a "Unique Selling Point" for Free-as-in-speech software. Organisations that want use it to reduce development costs and to later redistribute products need to accept the author's terms, or get off their arse and develop their own equivalent code.
LGPL-like for code that would, if it weren't for its intended usage, be otherwise licensed as GPL-like above, but it's better if it's widely used. Yes, even by proprietary applications.
MPL-like for 'donated' code for which the original author wishes to reserve rights for themselves that they don't necessarily wish to grant to others. Their code, their right to choose. If you don't like it, play somewhere else.
None of what I've written above is original, even rms has said similar [lwn.net] things [gnu.org] in the past.
Conceivably, I can accept (and even hope for) the theoretical possibility that the time will come when everyone accepts that Free software is here to stay and that no-one wishes to try to selfishly exploit it. Just like the possibility that one day humans will learn to treat each other with respect and consequently, police forces, weapons, property rights and even laws are no longer necessary to deter unwanted exploitation. Sadly, that day is not yet here. And that's where I disagree with esr.
human nature unchecked (Score:5, Interesting)
http://gpl-violations.org/ [gpl-violations.org]http://gpl-violations.o
Nothing more should need saying, but I've got a couple more minutes.
I'm sure at some point the use of open source software will be so ubiquitous as to make the result of hording, thieving, and conspiring by individuals and corporations ineffectual.
However, I still believe that we have not reached that cross roads yet. There are still a number of people and corporations who have the desire and the ability to plunder the hard work of those who produce the code and then conspire to both denegrate the open source offerings while profiting from that same well.
I like to call these entities the Robber Barons of the Information Age. They are filled with childish and immature emotions and characteristics. They see themselves as icons of a vast empire they built and they are justfied in their actions. Of course the truth is that no one man or even the entire clique of Robber Barons created the information age. In fact it has been the nameless and faceless masses of electronic/software engineers in the background producing all the fantastic hardware and software which makes the information age possible. These men who are supposed to be leaders instead have become filled with themselves. And it all comes down to human nature and the corruption of power.
The way I see it the GPL and the idea behind it is a tool that can be used to take back what has been stolen by the Robber Barons. Many of these same nameless masses who made the Barons are also producing open source code under the GPL and the GPL is poison to the thieving Barons, that is why they despise it to no end.
The GPL is a tool to help keep the Robber Barons human nature in check. I think the end result is that instead of having icons in the open source development circles there are leaders.
Anyhow, thats enough ranting for now.
burnin
p.s. Just a note on the mention of engineering. Not having a degree in engineering does not mean you are not an engineer and conversely having a degree in engineering does not make you an engineer. If you really want to know what an engineer is and determin if you are an engineer just look up the definition of engineer and engineering.
Not another GPL/BSD flamefest (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, ESR is a bullshit artist (Score:5, Insightful)
We Don't Need the ESR Anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy has 0% credibility from my point of vue, just like any stoopid politician who tries to push his agenda while telling you he's defending your freedom or whatever...
Get a job, and stop annoying us.
Kind of moot, isn't it? (Score:3)
Firstly there's the problem with all the little itty bitty utility programs that are GPLed that while technically not part of linux since linux is just the kernel, are still rather necessary for a distro of Linux to behave like a Unix - things like "grep" and "cat" and "bash" and so on. To un-GPL a distro of linux would require finding replacements from the ground-up for all of those tools. Secondly, the kernel itself is GPL'ed anyway, with masses of developers adding their own code into it under the understanding that it is GPL. To legally produce a new version of the the kernel at this point under a different license would require either the express consent of ALL THOSE DEVELOPERS WHO EVER ADDED A LINE OF CODE to the kernel, or a way to cut out just those bits contributed by the developers who refuse to put their code under a different license, and then replace them with something that isn't just an exact copy of the same code. There's just no way that is going to be practical. That's just not going to happen. And even then you'd be leaving behind the GPL version of the kernel that I'm sure would grow on its own and become its own fork of the kernel.
So in other words, the whole debate is moot. Like it or not, Linux is GPL to stay.
Human Nature, GPL and Bit Torrent. (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux is successful because of GPL. GPL is an incentive to share, you know that your sharing will result in more sharing. You know that when you contribute to GPL, you are encouraging more people to do the same. In the end you benefit as well.
There is a strong analogy with Bit Torrent. Same human nature factors. Bit Torrent works so well because of enforced sharing.
The alternative is what? The "honor system". Well that really doesn't work if you understand human nature.
The "honor system" completely opposite to the way corporations "MUST" act. Must in that if they can take it for free and give nothing back, then then must to maximize profits as they are obligated to do. GPL frees corporations of the necessity to not give anything back. There now is a case for sharing that is compatible with corporate governance.
GPL is a necessity.
Re:Just how much of the document has teeth, anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Shortly, it works like this: Company Foo infringes the GPL. If they go to court, they can try to argue the GPL doesn't apply - bad idea, since now it's entirely a copyright matter. And copyright says you can't take somebody else's stuff without permission, which means they're screwed.
Here's the thing, the GPL is the only thing that gives you the permission to redistribute the code. If you don't like it, that's fine, nobody forces you to agree to use it, but then the whole thing falls back to copyright law, which doesn't give you the permission to redistribute anything.
The GPL is unique in that it *grants* you privileges, instead of taking them away. Fighting the GPL will result in losing those privileges.
That's why nobody goes to court, because they wouldn't even be talking about the GPL there. They'd be deciding if there was or not copyright infringement.
Re:Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He is right ! (Score:4, Insightful)
GPL is about "converting" in the religious sense. Is this a bad thing? You tell me. You can choose not to be converted, and continue making excuses why you are so stingy with your source code, or you can share it freely. Be stingy, I don't care, but don't expect me to continue giving all my source code to you, so you can go off and sell it...
Re:GPL the bane of my life.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, George.
Re:GPL the bane of my life.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A consultant's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm missing important information about the situation above, but here's my t