Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Apr 2007 13:14 UTC, submitted by detonator
"I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux
wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible GPL license and therefore copyright violations in your bcw driver. We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license)." The entire thread can be found here.
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Member since:2005-07-02
No, I don't miss the point. You missed my point. My point is that you believe it is successful for different reasons than others believe it is successful.
I'm sorry, but you're not making much sense. Who are these others you are referring to? How do you know our opinions of the GPL's success differ?
It seems like you're trying to make a point here, but it's really not clear what it is. Work on it a bit more and come back to explain it further when you actually know what you're trying to say.
Secondly, *some* developers choose the GPL. *Many* others do not.
The GPL is still one of the most popular licenses around. But if you have some numbers you'd like to show everyone, please be my guest.
In sheer terms of volume of code, there is *less* pure GPL software than software under other licenses.
Of course. No one ever claimed that a majority of software projects used the GPL. However, it is still one of the most popular licenses out there, and I have yet to see you give us any kind of data that would prove this isn't the case.
Therefore, it is misleading to say flat out that "developers choose the GPL," if they all did, we wouldn't have license wars..
Way to put words into my mouth there. Did I say that *all* developers chose the GPL? No, I didn't. I said that "developers chooose the GPL". That means that an unspecified number of them do choose the GPL. The number is unimportant in that context. I'm not arguing about popularity here, only that, for those who choose the GPL, it is their right to do so, and not respecting that right is not respecting copyright law.
I don't know, but it seems your anti-GPL agenda is clouding your judgement here...
Member since:
2005-07-06
Developers choose the GPL. Who are you to say that they shouldn't? It's their code, they hold the copyright on it, it's up to them to decide how it can or can't be redistributed. There's little else to say about this...
No, I don't miss the point. You missed my point. My point is that you believe it is successful for different reasons than others believe it is successful.
Secondly, *some* developers choose the GPL. *Many* others do not. See the Apache, Perl, IBM Java, Eclipse, Apple, Cedega, OpenSolaris, Mozilla (originally), libsdl (LGPL, NOT GPL), *BSDs, and other projects.
In sheer terms of volume of code, there is *less* pure GPL software than software under other licenses. In fact, many GPL projects have *BSD* licensed code included in the project (that is still under the BSD license). Therefore, it is misleading to say flat out that "developers choose the GPL," if they all did, we wouldn't have license wars...