3 ms·
You continue to underestimate the importance of the original work as a product, and overestimate the importance of the license of the original work. The GPL do
by hhw 13y ago
You continue to underestimate the importance of the original work as a product, and overestimate the importance of the license of the original work.
The GPL doesn't guarantee that a potential derivative work would be open source. The developer that might have based their work on open source might choose not to use the code of the original work in their project so as to avoid having to make their own work open source as well. This is a loss to the world, as the quality of their work would most likely not be as good, either because the code wouldn't be community reviewed or simply because time was spent writing code with functionality that already exists as open source taking away time from other features.
GPL or BSD, somewhere along the line, the developer has to willingly make their work open source. The only case the GPL can force someone to make their work open source is if someone has used GPL code with the intention of violating the license, but are later exposed to have used GPL code and are shamed into open sourcing it.
At the end of the day, the user only has freedoms to the code that the developer chooses to grant. Whether this is by choosing to use GPL code in their project and making it GPL as well, using BSD code in their project and making it BSD as well, or not using GPL code (but possibly BSD code) and not making their work open source.