Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:01 UTC, submitted by Joel Dahl
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Member since:
2005-07-11
It is disheartening to see this opinion always modded down. (Oh well, maybe it was the inflammatory part and not the core issue that got the post modded down.)
Listen, GPL people, all things considered we are you allies, not your enemies. Not all GPL critics are evil. I can only speak for myself: I publish source, I advocate openness of hardware and software, standards, interoperability and I oppose software patents. But, I choose a more permissive license. And I accept the cost of not being able to reuse GPL code by mixing it into my own works. Some don't seem to understand the extent of that cost.
Software development is a lot about code reuse - from naive copy&paste programming of script or web code, to porting undocumented device driver code between very different operating systems. Do we all have to submit to a single license just to be able to freely share source with each other? I hope not. That's not the ecosystem I signed up for.
As I see it, the GPL primarily solves a problem I don't care about, which is "closing" of available source. I don't see it as such a big deal. It's not like the original source disappears, or stops working and can't be developed further.