Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 13, 6:39 pm, Steven D'Aprano
<ste... at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 May 2010 08:06:52 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote:

> Perhaps the Apache model doesn't work quite as well as you think?

Apparently it's 66 percent of the web servers for the million busiest
sites,  and presumably 65 for the next million, etc...

When I look at the netcraft graphs, the only thing that seemed to
cause a decline before last year was Microsoft and their marketing
muscle.  For example, they incentivize godaddy and others to run all
the parked sites on IIS.

In the graphs, there was a sudden spike in "other" at the beginning of
last year. My gut tells me this is ROR, django, and other similarly
permissively licensed software.  In any case, back when GPL take-up
was quite small, RMS was very dismissive of market numbers, but I
really have to ask:  where are all the GPL-licensed web servers?

> As far as not-so-niche software goes, the GPLed Linux OS is far more
> popular on the desktop than FreeBSD and OpenBSD together, and about equal
> in popularity to Mac OS. I'm not suggesting that the popularity of an OS
> is *entirely* dependent on the licence, but it may be a factor.

Well, despite what others have said here, I think the lingering
effects of the Unix lawsuit helped give Linux a push.  Torvalds
himself was a huge factor, and I'm willing to concede that the GPL
didn't hinder the quest for contributors.

The fact is that, in reality (Darwinian competition to determine the
best architecture aside) it's very nice to have a single primary point
of focus for an OS, and Unix was perceived to be hopelessly fragmented
by many would-be contributors who wouldn't know where to start.

I also firmly believe, as I have stated before, that the GPL is a much
more commercial license.  If you want to make money off something,
then, no doubt, GPL keeps your competitors from being able to take
what you wrote and redistribute it as closed source.  But, frankly I
view that as more of a business issue than a moral issue.

In any case, if you want to look, as a marketer would, at TAM (Total
Available Market), free software is completely floundering in the OS
space, and permissively licensed software owns the serious web server
space.

Regards,
Pat