Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 14, 8:57 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l... at geek-
central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
> In message <84a26d03-03b3-47d9-
>
> a1f9-107470b87... at k2g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>, Patrick Maupin wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Nevertheless, it’s probably a big factor in why the GPL has become the
> single most popular open-source licence.

Possibly.  I think a bigger factor is that the GPL is *designed* to
win license competitions.  If you view the license as part of the DNA
of a piece of software, then whenever two packages "breed" (are
combined) the resultant package will always have the GPL if either of
the source packages did.  In attempting to draw a biological parallel,
many have equated the GPL to a virus, but this analogy fails
miserably.  The "selfish gene" analogy has much to recommend it,
however:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene#.22Selfish.22_genes

It's an interesting exercise to extend the analogy to show how the GPL
gene mutated in a way to allow it to mate with even *more* licenses
(and always come out on top).  So now there are two incompatible
selfish gene FOSS licenses in the ecosystem.  The license genes always
propagate whenever the host software mates, but in order to have that
genetic advantage, they avoid allowing their host software to mate
whenever they couldn't be the dominant license gene of the resultant
package.  One side effect of this is that the two major GPL variants
are unable to mate with each other.

Regards,
Pat