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

[Mike Parker]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> On 31/03/2009 00:36, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

>> Sure, it is not the only project that is GPL'd, but it is one of the
>> only GPL'd projects out there that is the basis of a successful company.
>> I don't really know of any others. So here is a challenge, name 10 of
>> those companies.
>>
> come on.. why did Sun choose the GPL as the basis for almost all it's 
> products over less restrictive licenses as you say?
> Sun's products that are GPL'ed: Java, Netbeans, solaris, etc..  even the 
> specs for their CPU are open sourced!
> that telephony project, asterix (IIRC), provides jobs for many 
> consultant companies on setting up your own telephony solution based on 
> that project.
> that's just of the top of my head without doing any search...
> 

And notice that they actually used the Classpath Exception so that end 
users wouldn't be forced to GPL their products, which would have 
basically been a disaster. Makes one wonder why they chose GPL in the 
first place if they were just going to neutralize it.