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The main reason for this in my opinion is that the fear free software had of permissive licenses in the 90s by an large didn't come true. The GPL is excellent
by avar 10y ago
The main reason for this in my opinion is that the fear free software had of permissive licenses in the 90s by an large didn't come true.
The GPL is excellent to guard against the sort of embrace, extend and close that the GPL prevented when it came to GCC, Emacs etc. back in its day, but would likely have otherwise happened.
Times are different now, and while there's still some of that going on (e.g. Sony with FreeBSD) for the vast majority of free software out there companies see no point in maintaining some value-added fork, it's just going to cost them money. E.g. SQLite & cURL are a good example of this.
Nowadays your project is much more likely to die because of overly restrictive licensing than because some company steals it from you and refuses to give back. Imagine how much smaller SQLite would be if it was GPL 3 instead of public domain, ditto for cURL.
- cr0sh 10y ago> Times are different now Now. But what about tomorrow? Neither you nor I can know what tomorrow will bring. But should it revert back to the old status-quo, what then? What if these self-same companies take all of the nice BSD/MIT/non-GPL'd code, package it up, make it better - so much so that people prefer it over the original! - and sell it, and make a mint off it, and it becomes much more popular. They continue to extend it, but never give anything back to the original authors, and perhaps the original project dies from lack of use by people, and faltering participation of developers because no one is using it. So now - wonderful open source software goes from being open - to closed and proprietary. The users don't care - they are getting great value for their money, right? But the software, which was once open and useful for the developers, is virtually gone. Don't think it could ever change back to this? Don't be a fool. Maybe not in 5 years, or 10 - or maybe it will! History does repeat - or at least echoes loud and clearly. Being prepared for such a possibility is better, in my perspective, than assuming the way things are today is the way they'll always be going forward.
- acuozzo 10y ago> Times are different now This is perhaps due in part to the impact of widespread use of the GPL within the then-emerging FOSS community.