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

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:58:03 -0400, Sean Kelly <sean at invisibleduck.org>  
wrote:

> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>  Seems BSD should be Our Way
>
> If the attribution clause in the BSD license really does cover  
> application binaries built containing a BSD-licensed library then it's  
> pretty much not an option in most corporate environments.  I've tried to  
> get corporate documentation and legal teams to agree with this in the  
> past and was unsuccessful, to say the least.
>
> On Don's recommendation I've switched the Druntime license to use the  
> Boost license instead of BSD.  It's about as permissive as possible  
> without making the code public domain, and doesn't have any of the weird  
> problems "public domain" licensed software seems to have both with US  
> corporate lawyer paranoia and countries abroad with no legal support for  
> "public domain" copyrights.
>
> It's nice to see ESR coming around about the GPL though.  I don't know  
> anyone that will go near GPL-licensed source code for exactly the  
> reasons he mentions.

Interesting anecdote:  Our company developed a Linux driver to one piece  
of hardware that our largest customer used.  We did not release it under  
GPL terms but this is OK legally since the kernel doesn't require GPL'd  
drivers.

The customer had a problem with one of the stock open source drivers in  
their OS.  However, they couldn't get *any* support from the community  
because the community wouldn't even bother looking at a kernel that was  
"tainted" by a proprietary driver.  So we were *forced* to relicense our  
driver under GPL terms (this customer has a lot of clout), just so the  
free software community would look at a problem completely unrelated to  
our driver.  They probably never even looked at the source in our driver.

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