Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. & Microsoft coming to Linux

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:gql5ou$2te1$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 27/03/2009 19:17, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>
>> This is the kind of mentality I think that completely goes against
>> progress, and it's fostered by the GPL. I'm not saying the GPL is
>> useless, but I see little to no value in a for-profit company using it
>> unless they are forced to. And there's this holier-than-thou attitude
>> from GPL supporters that completely sucks.
>>
>> Anyway, I agree that the world could do just as good without GPL. Maybe
>> it was necessary in the beginning, but not any more.
>>
>> -Steve
>
> Both proprietary and free software have a place in the world since they 
> serve different purposes.
> for instance, I wouldn't want military software to be available online 
> with the risk of being exploited by terrorists but on the other hand I 
> wouldn't want to use any non reasonably free COTS software. When you buy a 
> car you are free to look under the hood and the same should apply to 
> software. sure, the manufacturer can and probably should void any warranty 
> if you mess with the internals of its product, but they shouldn't prevent 
> you access to those internals.
>
> "I see little to no value in a for-profit company using it [the GPL]"
> how do you explain Red-Hat's success? there are many many companies that 
> gain a lot by using GPL and they are certainly not forced to use it.
>
> I agree with you that there are zealots with that holier-than-thou 
> attitude and that this really sucks. by saying - "I agree that the world 
> could do just as good without GPL. Maybe it was necessary in the 
> beginning, but not any more. " you just joined the group of zealots.
>
> As I already said, in reality, both proprietary and free software are 
> useful since they fulfill different requirements. saying otherwise is 
> stupid and wrong.

I think you've misunderstood him. Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken, but I 
interpreted what he said as being "BSD/zlib/etc > GPL" rather than 
"proprietary is better than free/open/whatever-you-wanna-call-it".