Picking a license

[Carl Banks]

On May 9, 10:08 am, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 9 Mai, 09:05, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bottom line is, GPL hurts everyone: the companies and open source
> > community.  Unless you're one of a handful of projects with sufficient
> > leverage, or are indeed a petty jealous person fighting a holy war,
> > the GPL is a bad idea and everyone benefits from a more permissive
> > licence.
>
> Oh sure: the GPL hurts everyone, like all the companies who have made
> quite a lot of money out of effectively making Linux the new
> enterprise successor to Unix, plus all the companies and individuals
> who have taken the sources and rolled their own distributions.

Relative to what they could have done with a more permissive license?
Yes.  GPL hurts everyone relative to licenses that don't drive wedges
and prevent interoperability between software.

You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
open source licenses.


> P.S. And the GPL isn't meant to further the cause of open source: it's
> meant to further the Free Software cause, which is not at all the same
> thing.

It doesn't matter what the GPL "meant" to do, it matters what it does,
which is hurt everyone (relative to almost all other licenses).


> Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your
> terminology right.

I don't agree with FSF's defintion of free software and refuse to
abide by it.  GPL isn't free software; any software that tells me I
can't compile it in with a closed source API isn't free.  Period.


Carl Banks