"A research firm serving the mobile phone industry has published an 18-page whitepaper about open source licensing. Entitled 'GPLv2 vs. GPLv3', the paper examines the meteoric rise of open source software, and the forces that shaped each license, before concluding with an extremely detailed point-by-point comparison."
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Member since:2005-07-24
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Virtually no FOSS project which is not under GPL can use code from a GPL'd project. Even GPLv2 projects are prohibited from using GPLv3 code. That's a huge barrier to code sharing. A one-way barrier, though, for the most part, since great care has been taken by the GPLvX authors to ensure what they term "compatibility" with other FOSS licenses. That means making sure that GPL projects can take from other projects as they please, without the donor projects receiving anything in return.
I'm willing to accept that situation as (possibly) being good for FOSS as a whole. But please do not just ignore the fact that copyleft licenses do erect barriers to code sharing in the FOSS world.
I would file your argument in the "sometimes the benefits outweigh the disadvantages" category.
Edited 2007-10-02 03:30
Member since:2005-07-15
>That's a huge barrier to code sharing. A one-way barrier, though, for the most part, since great care has been taken by the GPLvX authors to ensure what they term "compatibility" with other FOSS licenses.
GPL compatibility is not a special compatibility it's the very normal compatibility we know from any other area.
Compatible means that you can mix code. You can mix BSDL and GPL code, you can mix Apache-License and GPLv3 code, etc.
There is absolutely no technical or legal barrier. Maybe there is a personal barrier if an author of BSD code don't want to combine his code with GPL code. But than this is his personal decision and not a barrier of the GPL or any strange definition of compatibility.
What you mean is that you can't relicense GPL code. But that's relicensing and not compatibility.
Relicensing is not possible but compatibility (especially for GPLv3) is quite good.
Member since:
2005-07-24
"BSD: Barriers to sharing code are do more harm than good.
GPL: Barriers to code sharing are unfortunate, but do more good than harm.
You got this backwards. The GPL is not a barrier to code sharing, it's a mandater of it. The GPL prevents a distributer from refusing to share the code. A BSD license allows the distributer to refuse to share the code.