9 ms·

Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy.

58 points by bkudria 18y ago

graemep 18y ago
Another non-story. A repeat of what ESR has been saying for some time now, with the standard rebuttals.
softbuilder 18y ago
It's only heresy if you bought into the religion in the first place.
pmarin 18y ago
It is not heresy, it is common sense.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  Actually, it's self-serving stupidity.
10ren 18y ago
This was the basis of the "open source" split from "free software". His examples are interesting, but of course don't apply to projects that were closed in the first place (adobe/google/microsoft/oracle/ibm - anyone making serious money from selling software). And for closed source projects, dropping the GPL would also change the game as a whole in other ways, perhaps unexpected.
- bitdiddle 18y ago
  Exactly, I remember these arguments then, the bottom line is the open source "movement" was all about promoting the superior development model. RMS, Eben Moglen, and others warned against this. I also recall thinking this was just some folks looking to monetize their GNU/Linux work. The arguments about scale are interesting. For an IBM the GPL is just fine, they have the size to compete against anyone with value added services on top of Linux. For smaller, open source projects I've seen them prefer apache 2.0, I speculate because it encourages commercial growth. When you're IBM someone has to grow pretty big to pose a threat. For their other closed products they continue to enjoy great revenues. They can put the resources into keeping them best of breed. At the end of the day I believe the GPL best serves the rights of individual programmers and a moral argument can be made that software, just like mathematics, should be free. Notice that mathematics is also largely a collaborative effort, it's very seldom done well by isolated individuals.
  - astine 18y ago
    IBM uses the GPL as a weapon. Linux growth hurts Microsoft and provides them a platform push their own products without Microsoft's involvement. Ordinarily however, IBM considers it's greatest asset it IP, and they see 'GPLing' their software as a threat to their IP. They are actually rather ambivalent towards the FOSS ideology.
manish 18y ago
The main point of ESR seems to be that it is economically bad for companies to close the source of their product, which is not very true considering apple has very good success rate with both MAC and iPhone. He has not give examples of his "study" about companies which lost because of closing the source of some open source software. If lawyers and corporate bosses are afraid of GPL, let them be. How can you justify removing of GPL just because lawyers and corporate bosses who never contributed anything to free community are afraid of it?
- tome 18y ago
  Quite. And the observation that the rise free software movement has been strongly associated with copyleft licences suggests that what ESR has no basis in reality.
tutwabee 18y ago
What is the difference between Raymond's proposed non-restrictive open source software licensing plan and unleashing software into the public domain? It seems like the authors of such software would have absolutely no control over their software under these licenses, effectively forfeiting their intellectual property rights.
- gtufano 18y ago
  Well, if you release in public domain you lose any right, AFAIK. Someone could step over, take your code and have intellectual property over it. You don't forfeit your property of the code with BSD licensing. IANAL, of course.
  - lutorm 18y ago
    Someone can't make public domain software unpublic. They can take it and do what they please, but they can't change the terms of use for others. AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it.
    - anamax 18y ago
      > AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it. They can't assume ownership of exactly what the US govt released, but they can create a derived work and own that.
      - lutorm 18y ago
        True, but that's fine. It doesn't affect you in any negative way.
phugoid 18y ago
I don't really understand esr. I can't reconcile the elevated discourse of The Cathedral & the Bazaar and The Art of UNIX Programming with the constant self-praise and trolling in his blog and elsewhere. He's just too smart to be that way. My instinct is to disagree with anyone who speaks in those tones, until I take time to really dissect what he said (and then disagree on better principles!).
- Eliezer 18y ago
  You put more effort into crafting books than blog posts; the difference can be enough to make you sound like a completely different person.
  - gonzopancho 18y ago
    It may not be just individual 'effort'. There are editors involved in one process, and not the other. For all we know, he writes books that sound like his blog posts, and these get "cleaned up" in the editorial process.
    - davidw 18y ago
      Cathedral and the Bazaar was, originally, just an article on his web site. And it was quite well written.
      - neilk 18y ago
        Are you guys actually arguing that CatB was better sourced than this article? It wasn't. It was just one relatively unknown guy's impression of what he thought made free software work, with a similarly self-congratulatory tone. If you thought fame went to ESR's head, you're wrong; he was always like that.
        davidw 18y ago
        Yes, I am arguing that it was a good article and did a good job of describing what was going on. ESR certainly has his flaws, but that paper really was a well-done summary of how this stuff works and why, much better than anything else that was out there at the time (I remember reading it in 1998, I think it was). I don't think he's done much since then that was worth writing home about, but that doesn't take anything away from that particular accomplishment.
thisrod 18y ago
I don't think courts need to enforce contracts anymore. If someone doesn't live up to their word, others will find out and refuse to trust the bastard. Dishonesty is a losing strategy in the long run, and no one is likely to try it. Furthermore, customers get scared off by contracts that they don't understand, because they could be held to some obnoxious clause that's hidden in there. Enforcing contracts is inefficient, and we should stop doing it. Is there more to ESR's argument than that?
- bmelton 18y ago
  The reputation aspect doesn't really hold water, as a person's reputation doesn't travel that far, even in this global economy. It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career, but he's a high profile individual that many people know on sight. If I started ripping people off, there's nothing to say I couldn't easily mitigate any negative PR by changing names (or on the internet, just changing handles). In more local endeavors, I could make a mint, ruin my name, and just move to another state (or if pressed, another country.) Contract law still bears an important role in accountability, IMHO.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career... Yeah, about $65 billion too late. It's not even a question about reputation scaling -- which (as you say) it does not do, which it hasn't ever done, since even in 10,000 BC you could travel to a place beyond the range of your reputation. (Maybe the Internet will change that. The jury is still out on whether it can, as well as on whether the negative consequences of that are too great and we'll have to take steps to ensure that the Internet can't destroy your reputation worldwide. Reputation isn't all smiles and balloons. You can destroy innocent lives with reputation. Happens all the time.) Reputation just doesn't work in all sorts of situations. Madoff is a prime example, but anyone who uses Twitter, reads The Four Hour Workweek or spends twenty minutes watching TV commercials can find thousands of additional examples. Reputation is easily faked. It is easily bought. It is too readily extrapolated from one narrow field of endeavor to another. It is biased toward members of your family, and toward people who resemble members of your family. It relies on past results to predict future results, and thereby mispredicts events that occur on a longer time scale than the acquisition of a reputation. It works by implicitly assuming its own effectiveness and breaks down in edge cases. ("Why would Mr. Jones feed me Kool-Aid laced with poison? Just think what that would do to his reputation!") Most importantly, reputation is just a predictive tool. When it fails, it leaves you with no recourse: That is not its job. I can use my accountant's reputation to predict whether he will steal my money. But if he does steal my money, reputation is now useless as a tool for getting my money back. That's what a contract is for. The primary purpose of a contract isn't promoting trust; it promotes trust because its primary purpose is to give me recourse after trust breaks down. I can try to take my money back from my account -- and if that doesn't work I can attempt to take it out of his insurance company, his auditors, or even people he has previously paid (look up clawback in the dictionary -- my accountant just explained it to me).
trjordan 18y ago
I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is that it's always designed by committee. In most cases, this produces cleaner, faster, more robust code, but it's not true in every case. Open-source code has this tendency to get the basics right before improving the user experience, but if the standards and basics are fuzzy, the product never gets polished. Take OpenOffice - by trying to both copy MS and improve MS, it's no wonder the entire thing is a big bloated mess. Some others have mentioned Apple as a counter-example, and I think they're dead on. By allowing BSD to be close-source forked, the market provided the economic incentive to allow Apple to run with it. They could then close a lot of the difficulties in an OS (arbitrary hardware setups, unwillingness to couple strongly to applications, etc.), and they've made an incredible product out of it. Philosophically, open-source would never make anything like OS X, because of the amount of vertical integration. There isn't always incentive to move a project back to closed-source, and it's hard to argue that it's a long term strategy, but you can't say that the market universally crushes projects that aren't open-source.
- eru 18y ago
  OpenOffice was already borked before it was opened. Abiword seems to work just fine in contrast.
leftcoaster 18y ago
I don't find his argument particularly convincing. He's assuming that the market can see that something that was open is now closed. And while that might be true for an end user application, it's not at all true for libraries and frameworks that are folded into closed applications. I'm the author of an LGPL-ed library. It sees a modest amount of use and my goal in choosing that license is that any changes made to that library be shared back with the rest of the community. It's not GPL-ed, so you don't have to share your application code, but if you change my library, you do have to share your changes/improvements. If you don't want to share, then don't use my library. Simple, right? Well, every few months I get a note from someone who has noticed an application that doesn't meet this simple test. And I have to send them a dunning notice about the license violation. How many applications are there that I don't get notes about? And absent a license, does anyone seriously think that the mass market would give up "desirable application X" because its creators were bad actors vis-a-vis some embedded library?
TJensen 18y ago
One of the things he mentions is that all GPL does is provide a mechanism to allow companies to also charge for the code. I disagree with that. I worked at a start-up that wanted to open source its code. Without the GPL, there would be no way it could do that, as a larger competitor could pick up the code base and out-market the company. The GPL is what made it possible for that company to consider open sourcing its product. I'm sure there are other small companies like that as well. It seems like removing the GPL would only be beneficial to large companies (and, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but I see its value).
biohacker42 18y ago
Exactly how did ESR get to be so prominent in the community? <- what ever that means.
- alecco 18y ago
  Some famous rants like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The irony is most big bazaar projects switched to a cathedral model, in particular the Linux kernel. (I'm not against or in favor of this.) The Slashdot crowd used to hype-love him.
  - randallsquared 18y ago
    It seemed as if the Slashdot crowd, et al, held him personally responsible for the dot com crash, coming as it did shortly after he talked about how weird it was to be rich (of course he lost it due to dropping stock prices, I think).
tptacek 18y ago
Well, it worked. Despite the fact that his argument has no merit and even less relevance (a license debate, in 2009?), here we are: talking about Eric S. Raymond, someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in ages. This line of argument has been part of Raymond's strategy for years. When last we saw it, he was arguing that vendors should be allowed to embed binary blobs into the running Linux kernel, because it didn't really matter if we could read driver code --- Linux just needed good device support, so people would accept it. We get it, Raymond. Nobody's paying attention to you. Here, we'll all fix that now. Feel better?
- rbanffy 18y ago
  So, in face of irrelevance, ESR has to make controversial statements like this to retain some eyeballs. That's sad.
- gonzopancho 18y ago
  > someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in ages. well, to be fair, he throws code into gpsd at times. not that gpsd is a great codebase.
alecco 18y ago
> Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and > then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail. It sucks if you see people being charged for your free code by some scumbag freeloader and the users end up with an inferior program. People with that mentality don't mind spam-vertising to push their scams. I used to be pro-BSD/MIT licenses, now I'm pro GPL again.
ZeroGravitas 18y ago
Assume you accept his argument that the open source process is such an advantage and that the market is efficient enough to punish companies who use open source code but don't reciprocate. Why then isn't the market efficient enough to punish those companies who have an irrational fear of the GPL (and therefore refuse to take advantage of the majority of open source code)? This appears to be his only stated problem with the GPL, and I thought the GPL is anti-business meme would have died long ago given the continued success of Linux.
chanux 18y ago
>I don't think we need licenses like the GPL -ESR GPL is the glue that binds the community. Without that everything will fall apart. And ERS wanna go that way. So bad. I'm really disappointed of his view.
lallysingh 18y ago
Ignoring the economic argument, I'm happy to see that there's mass-market-ish consideration of opening up the licenses. BSD is more inline with original hacker culture (IMHO, obviously). The GPL forces you to believe what I believe to use my code. Dropping it to get rid of viral fears is a very good idea. The more use the code has, the better off we all are -- there are enough other good reasons than force for people to share changes and contributions.
petercooper 18y ago
The Ruby and Rails communities realized this years ago. Almost all open source in those communities is MIT or BSD licensed. You can usually spot a newbie or license zealot by the use of GPL.
- jeremyw 18y ago
  Here, here. I've always committed original code to the public domain and have been glad to see greater use of less restrictive licenses. Whatever havoc near-term miscreants create, sharealike is not easily thwarted; transparency and trust have proven brawny allies.
mroman 18y ago
I think ESR has an excellent point, and interpret his saying that to mean that it is not mandatory to release under the GPL if it hinders what you are doing, because actual market conditions have proven that the closed source model can't compete in many ways, thus it is not as large a threat as it can be perceived to be.

58 points by bkudria 18y ago

graemep 18y ago

Another non-story. A repeat of what ESR has been saying for some time now, with the standard rebuttals.

softbuilder 18y ago

It's only heresy if you bought into the religion in the first place.

pmarin 18y ago

It is not heresy, it is common sense.

rbanffy 18y ago
Actually, it's self-serving stupidity.

10ren 18y ago

This was the basis of the "open source" split from "free software". His examples are interesting, but of course don't apply to projects that were closed in the first place (adobe/google/microsoft/oracle/ibm - anyone making serious money from selling software). And for closed source projects, dropping the GPL would also change the game as a whole in other ways, perhaps unexpected.

bitdiddle 18y ago
Exactly, I remember these arguments then, the bottom line is the open source "movement" was all about promoting the superior development model. RMS, Eben Moglen, and others warned against this. I also recall thinking this was just some folks looking to monetize their GNU/Linux work. The arguments about scale are interesting. For an IBM the GPL is just fine, they have the size to compete against anyone with value added services on top of Linux. For smaller, open source projects I've seen them prefer apache 2.0, I speculate because it encourages commercial growth. When you're IBM someone has to grow pretty big to pose a threat. For their other closed products they continue to enjoy great revenues. They can put the resources into keeping them best of breed. At the end of the day I believe the GPL best serves the rights of individual programmers and a moral argument can be made that software, just like mathematics, should be free. Notice that mathematics is also largely a collaborative effort, it's very seldom done well by isolated individuals.
- astine 18y ago
  IBM uses the GPL as a weapon. Linux growth hurts Microsoft and provides them a platform push their own products without Microsoft's involvement. Ordinarily however, IBM considers it's greatest asset it IP, and they see 'GPLing' their software as a threat to their IP. They are actually rather ambivalent towards the FOSS ideology.

manish 18y ago

The main point of ESR seems to be that it is economically bad for companies to close the source of their product, which is not very true considering apple has very good success rate with both MAC and iPhone. He has not give examples of his "study" about companies which lost because of closing the source of some open source software. If lawyers and corporate bosses are afraid of GPL, let them be. How can you justify removing of GPL just because lawyers and corporate bosses who never contributed anything to free community are afraid of it?

tome 18y ago
Quite. And the observation that the rise free software movement has been strongly associated with copyleft licences suggests that what ESR has no basis in reality.

tutwabee 18y ago

What is the difference between Raymond's proposed non-restrictive open source software licensing plan and unleashing software into the public domain? It seems like the authors of such software would have absolutely no control over their software under these licenses, effectively forfeiting their intellectual property rights.

gtufano 18y ago
Well, if you release in public domain you lose any right, AFAIK. Someone could step over, take your code and have intellectual property over it. You don't forfeit your property of the code with BSD licensing. IANAL, of course.
- lutorm 18y ago
  Someone can't make public domain software unpublic. They can take it and do what they please, but they can't change the terms of use for others. AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it.
  - anamax 18y ago
    > AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it. They can't assume ownership of exactly what the US govt released, but they can create a derived work and own that.
    - lutorm 18y ago
      True, but that's fine. It doesn't affect you in any negative way.

phugoid 18y ago

I don't really understand esr. I can't reconcile the elevated discourse of The Cathedral & the Bazaar and The Art of UNIX Programming with the constant self-praise and trolling in his blog and elsewhere. He's just too smart to be that way. My instinct is to disagree with anyone who speaks in those tones, until I take time to really dissect what he said (and then disagree on better principles!).

Eliezer 18y ago
You put more effort into crafting books than blog posts; the difference can be enough to make you sound like a completely different person.
- gonzopancho 18y ago
  It may not be just individual 'effort'. There are editors involved in one process, and not the other. For all we know, he writes books that sound like his blog posts, and these get "cleaned up" in the editorial process.
  - davidw 18y ago
    Cathedral and the Bazaar was, originally, just an article on his web site. And it was quite well written.
    - neilk 18y ago
      Are you guys actually arguing that CatB was better sourced than this article? It wasn't. It was just one relatively unknown guy's impression of what he thought made free software work, with a similarly self-congratulatory tone. If you thought fame went to ESR's head, you're wrong; he was always like that.
      - davidw 18y ago
        Yes, I am arguing that it was a good article and did a good job of describing what was going on. ESR certainly has his flaws, but that paper really was a well-done summary of how this stuff works and why, much better than anything else that was out there at the time (I remember reading it in 1998, I think it was). I don't think he's done much since then that was worth writing home about, but that doesn't take anything away from that particular accomplishment.

thisrod 18y ago

I don't think courts need to enforce contracts anymore. If someone doesn't live up to their word, others will find out and refuse to trust the bastard. Dishonesty is a losing strategy in the long run, and no one is likely to try it. Furthermore, customers get scared off by contracts that they don't understand, because they could be held to some obnoxious clause that's hidden in there. Enforcing contracts is inefficient, and we should stop doing it. Is there more to ESR's argument than that?

bmelton 18y ago
The reputation aspect doesn't really hold water, as a person's reputation doesn't travel that far, even in this global economy. It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career, but he's a high profile individual that many people know on sight. If I started ripping people off, there's nothing to say I couldn't easily mitigate any negative PR by changing names (or on the internet, just changing handles). In more local endeavors, I could make a mint, ruin my name, and just move to another state (or if pressed, another country.) Contract law still bears an important role in accountability, IMHO.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career... Yeah, about $65 billion too late. It's not even a question about reputation scaling -- which (as you say) it does not do, which it hasn't ever done, since even in 10,000 BC you could travel to a place beyond the range of your reputation. (Maybe the Internet will change that. The jury is still out on whether it can, as well as on whether the negative consequences of that are too great and we'll have to take steps to ensure that the Internet can't destroy your reputation worldwide. Reputation isn't all smiles and balloons. You can destroy innocent lives with reputation. Happens all the time.) Reputation just doesn't work in all sorts of situations. Madoff is a prime example, but anyone who uses Twitter, reads The Four Hour Workweek or spends twenty minutes watching TV commercials can find thousands of additional examples. Reputation is easily faked. It is easily bought. It is too readily extrapolated from one narrow field of endeavor to another. It is biased toward members of your family, and toward people who resemble members of your family. It relies on past results to predict future results, and thereby mispredicts events that occur on a longer time scale than the acquisition of a reputation. It works by implicitly assuming its own effectiveness and breaks down in edge cases. ("Why would Mr. Jones feed me Kool-Aid laced with poison? Just think what that would do to his reputation!") Most importantly, reputation is just a predictive tool. When it fails, it leaves you with no recourse: That is not its job. I can use my accountant's reputation to predict whether he will steal my money. But if he does steal my money, reputation is now useless as a tool for getting my money back. That's what a contract is for. The primary purpose of a contract isn't promoting trust; it promotes trust because its primary purpose is to give me recourse after trust breaks down. I can try to take my money back from my account -- and if that doesn't work I can attempt to take it out of his insurance company, his auditors, or even people he has previously paid (look up clawback in the dictionary -- my accountant just explained it to me).

trjordan 18y ago

I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is that it's always designed by committee. In most cases, this produces cleaner, faster, more robust code, but it's not true in every case. Open-source code has this tendency to get the basics right before improving the user experience, but if the standards and basics are fuzzy, the product never gets polished. Take OpenOffice - by trying to both copy MS and improve MS, it's no wonder the entire thing is a big bloated mess. Some others have mentioned Apple as a counter-example, and I think they're dead on. By allowing BSD to be close-source forked, the market provided the economic incentive to allow Apple to run with it. They could then close a lot of the difficulties in an OS (arbitrary hardware setups, unwillingness to couple strongly to applications, etc.), and they've made an incredible product out of it. Philosophically, open-source would never make anything like OS X, because of the amount of vertical integration. There isn't always incentive to move a project back to closed-source, and it's hard to argue that it's a long term strategy, but you can't say that the market universally crushes projects that aren't open-source.

eru 18y ago
OpenOffice was already borked before it was opened. Abiword seems to work just fine in contrast.

leftcoaster 18y ago

I don't find his argument particularly convincing. He's assuming that the market can see that something that was open is now closed. And while that might be true for an end user application, it's not at all true for libraries and frameworks that are folded into closed applications. I'm the author of an LGPL-ed library. It sees a modest amount of use and my goal in choosing that license is that any changes made to that library be shared back with the rest of the community. It's not GPL-ed, so you don't have to share your application code, but if you change my library, you do have to share your changes/improvements. If you don't want to share, then don't use my library. Simple, right? Well, every few months I get a note from someone who has noticed an application that doesn't meet this simple test. And I have to send them a dunning notice about the license violation. How many applications are there that I don't get notes about? And absent a license, does anyone seriously think that the mass market would give up "desirable application X" because its creators were bad actors vis-a-vis some embedded library?

TJensen 18y ago

One of the things he mentions is that all GPL does is provide a mechanism to allow companies to also charge for the code. I disagree with that. I worked at a start-up that wanted to open source its code. Without the GPL, there would be no way it could do that, as a larger competitor could pick up the code base and out-market the company. The GPL is what made it possible for that company to consider open sourcing its product. I'm sure there are other small companies like that as well. It seems like removing the GPL would only be beneficial to large companies (and, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but I see its value).

biohacker42 18y ago

Exactly how did ESR get to be so prominent in the community? <- what ever that means.

alecco 18y ago
Some famous rants like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The irony is most big bazaar projects switched to a cathedral model, in particular the Linux kernel. (I'm not against or in favor of this.) The Slashdot crowd used to hype-love him.
- randallsquared 18y ago
  It seemed as if the Slashdot crowd, et al, held him personally responsible for the dot com crash, coming as it did shortly after he talked about how weird it was to be rich (of course he lost it due to dropping stock prices, I think).

tptacek 18y ago

Well, it worked. Despite the fact that his argument has no merit and even less relevance (a license debate, in 2009?), here we are: talking about Eric S. Raymond, someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in ages. This line of argument has been part of Raymond's strategy for years. When last we saw it, he was arguing that vendors should be allowed to embed binary blobs into the running Linux kernel, because it didn't really matter if we could read driver code --- Linux just needed good device support, so people would accept it. We get it, Raymond. Nobody's paying attention to you. Here, we'll all fix that now. Feel better?

rbanffy 18y ago
So, in face of irrelevance, ESR has to make controversial statements like this to retain some eyeballs. That's sad.
gonzopancho 18y ago
> someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in ages. well, to be fair, he throws code into gpsd at times. not that gpsd is a great codebase.

alecco 18y ago

> Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and > then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail. It sucks if you see people being charged for your free code by some scumbag freeloader and the users end up with an inferior program. People with that mentality don't mind spam-vertising to push their scams. I used to be pro-BSD/MIT licenses, now I'm pro GPL again.

ZeroGravitas 18y ago

Assume you accept his argument that the open source process is such an advantage and that the market is efficient enough to punish companies who use open source code but don't reciprocate. Why then isn't the market efficient enough to punish those companies who have an irrational fear of the GPL (and therefore refuse to take advantage of the majority of open source code)? This appears to be his only stated problem with the GPL, and I thought the GPL is anti-business meme would have died long ago given the continued success of Linux.

chanux 18y ago

>I don't think we need licenses like the GPL -ESR GPL is the glue that binds the community. Without that everything will fall apart. And ERS wanna go that way. So bad. I'm really disappointed of his view.

lallysingh 18y ago

Ignoring the economic argument, I'm happy to see that there's mass-market-ish consideration of opening up the licenses. BSD is more inline with original hacker culture (IMHO, obviously). The GPL forces you to believe what I believe to use my code. Dropping it to get rid of viral fears is a very good idea. The more use the code has, the better off we all are -- there are enough other good reasons than force for people to share changes and contributions.

petercooper 18y ago

The Ruby and Rails communities realized this years ago. Almost all open source in those communities is MIT or BSD licensed. You can usually spot a newbie or license zealot by the use of GPL.

jeremyw 18y ago
Here, here. I've always committed original code to the public domain and have been glad to see greater use of less restrictive licenses. Whatever havoc near-term miscreants create, sharealike is not easily thwarted; transparency and trust have proven brawny allies.

mroman 18y ago

I think ESR has an excellent point, and interpret his saying that to mean that it is not mandatory to release under the GPL if it hinders what you are doing, because actual market conditions have proven that the closed source model can't compete in many ways, thus it is not as large a threat as it can be perceived to be.