Picking a license

[Lie Ryan]

On 05/11/10 20:24, Paul Boddie wrote:
> On 10 Mai, 17:01, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
>> statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
>> the post I was referring to:
>>
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
> 
> Of course I have read it, and not just recently either. But this is a
> position paper by the author of the licence, and it doesn't mean that
> someone who has written a GPL-licensed library completely agrees with
> that position. And anyway, it's a case of "take it or leave it" - it's
> not like the author or the FSF are sneaking stuff into every product
> and every corner of the market and then telling you that you can't
> "unchoose" their stuff.


Come on, 99%  of the projects released under GPL did so because they
don't want to learn much about the law; they just need to release it
under a certain license so their users have some legal certainty. Most
programmers are not lawyers and don't care about the law and don't care
about the GPL; if a commercial programmer want to use the GPL-code in an
incompatible licensed program, and he comes up asking, many would just
be happy to say yes.

Most people release their code in GPL just because it's popular, not for
the exact clauses in it. Heck, many people that releases code in GPL
might not actually have read the full license.

Only big GPL projects have the resources to waste on a lawyer. And only
very big projects have the resources to waste on enforcing the license
they uses. The rest of us just don't care.