Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 8th Jan 2009 00:15 UTC
Thanks to SGI, a potential disaster for Free software purists has been averted. Back in January 2008, it was discovered by the OpenBSD guys that some of the contributions to X.org and the Mesa 3D Graphics Library made by SGI were covered under permissive open source licenses that didn't fall within FSF's definition of Free software. The FSF Compliance Lab worked with SGI to resolve the issue, and they succeeded.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Well............... X.org is certainly one example. The number one reason why more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even the LGPL tend to be used is because of linking to proprietary software. There really isn't any other reason you can come up with. People are certainly free to do that, but the net effect is that developers using your code tend to go off and write their own code somewhere else that could be used to move the project much further forwards. Would we really have the number of drivers we do in the Linux kernel without the GPL?
All you have to do is look around at various 'open source' projects, look at their main licenses and look at how much code is going into them. GPLed projects tend to have quite a bit more code going into them versus their more liberally licensed counterparts, and they, like X.org, are tending to struggle to attract code contributions and long-term contributors. It's a snowball effect.