The license is the reason why all this exists.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| swbrown Aug 02, 2006 11:39 PM EDT |
Why do people make stupid statements like this: "At the same time, Stallman and the FSF also have choices. On one hand, they may opt for a GPL 3 that maximizes freedom over the business and development model values of other current GPL stakeholders—and end up with a license that nobody uses." The same kind of FUD was always thrown at GPL 2 as well about it not being 'pragmatic', but it's the reason why we're where we are today - all the 'pragmatic' licenses led projects to failure. Yet still, even after massive proof that it works, people still revert to the same old idiotic comments.. |
| grouch Aug 02, 2006 11:58 PM EDT |
>"[...] all the 'pragmatic' licenses led projects to failure" Not "all". Consider X.org, Mozilla, Apache, as examples of large projects that are free software, by the FSF definition, but are not licensed under the GPL. Free software licenses are much more pragmatic than non-free software licenses. Free software licenses invite all who wish to examine, improve and adapt the code. Non-free software licenses exclude most of the developers in the world, thereby making them dependent on a very limited set of developers. This artificially limits the code's value. It is more pragmatic to provide the means for code to be evolved to the best the world can do. |
| swbrown Aug 03, 2006 1:20 AM EDT |
X.org is a great example of why 'pragmatic' licensse fail, not sure why you listed it as a counter. When folks say 'pragmatic' they usually mean 'impose no significant restrictions and allow the code to be forked closed'. xfree86's development was CONSTANTLY stopped by small companies head-hunting any dev that started working on it and was doing something useful. They'd make accelerated servers with recast licenses like AccelX and MetroX, eventually die, and all that work would be thrown away. As a result, the pace of improvement of xfree86 was best described as glacial. It was competing against itself. The same happened to the WINE project where companies were constantly sniping developers and making commercial branches that would go nowhere and wind up in trashed code. The WINE project eventually got fed up and GPLed their code. Similar happened to FreeBSD when Apple forked it and changed the license so that their changes could never be brought back into FreeBSD. As a result, FreeBSD found it had created its own competiton against the BSD license - it was attacking itself. Removing some of that 'pragmatic' is why the GPL has succeeded. People don't have an option to not work together, so they do, and everyone prospers. |
| dinotrac Aug 03, 2006 1:26 AM EDT |
>Why do people make stupid statements like this: What is so stupid? Why do you presume that getting GPLV2 right means that GPLV3 will be good? History is full of one-hit wonders, not to mention demonstrations why "if a little is good, more must be better" doesn't always work out so well. Maybe Stallman and Moglen weren't so smart back in 1992 or thereabouts (I don't know the right year, but I think that's close). Maybe they stumbled on to "The One Great License". Maybe there is nothing to do but to make it worse. Don't know. The danger is that Stallman and FSF will take a good thing and screw it up. They might not. They might make it better. But... Already, the biggest, most popular, and most visible GPLV2 project appears ready to eschew the new license, if it has to. Will others? Will dual-license projects like qt and mysql want to move the v3 branch, which may risk the commercial spillover they derive from widespread free use of their products? Will the list of major projects choosing licenses other than GPL -- or creating their own GPL-compatible, but not GPL licenses? Will Stallman even care? After all, GNU projects will use the new license, and he is king of GNU. |
| grouch Aug 03, 2006 1:53 AM EDT |
swbrown: >"When folks say 'pragmatic' they usually mean 'impose no significant restrictions and allow the code to be forked closed'." Thanks for redefining pragmatic for me; I wasn't aware it was synonymous with the BSD license. Still, I would hardly call the BSDs a failure. X.org is not XFree86, it is the successor to XFree86. It appears to be doing fine. dinotrac: >"Already, the biggest, most popular, and most visible GPLV2 project appears ready to eschew the new license, if it has to." There is still considerable debate about whether Linux could change from v2 even if Linus was satisfied with the eventual GPLv3. |
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