Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Sep 2009 12:41 UTC, submitted by nitsudima
David Chisnall casts a critical eye over the GNU General Public License and asks whether it's done more harm than good for the Free Software movement. "Looking back, has the GPL been a help, or a hindrance? And will it continue to be a help or hindrance in the future?"
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Member since:
2006-01-28
The linked article cherry-picks a few examples to push the idea that the code-sharing that the GPL legally requires is counterproductive, because companies would do it anyway and do it better.
Yeah, right, for each of the examples given, I can provide countless others on a 1-to-10 ratio of BSD code that was improved and never returned to its mainline.
So, the article in essence is another license-trolling attempt. People have very clear ideas by now about why they pick the licenses they use and to claim that the GPL has failed in view of the thousands upon thousands of GPL applications which get contributions from a host of companies and people is utter nonsense.