3 ms·

Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.

saurik 14y ago
I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed. Two major realizations have occurred to me: 1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD. 2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a lot of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things. The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.
  - saurik 14y ago
    I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL requires... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.

einhverfr 14y ago
I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed. Two major realizations have occurred to me: 1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD. 2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a lot of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things. The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.
- saurik 14y ago
  I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL requires... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]