Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Mar 2009 18:02 UTC, submitted by google_ninja
Eric S. Raymond is one of the three big figures in open source, together with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. During a talk for the Long Island Linux User Group, he made some interesting statements about the GPL, namely that the GPL is no longer needed due to the way the open source movement works.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2006-04-22
And, no one forced anyone to pick the GPL in the first place. You are right that the *beauty* of the GPL is that it makes it easy for developers to not think to hard about the details but that isn't because the FSF is forcing anything on anyone (this is the part where you realize you were really talking out your butt).
Plus, anyone can change their licensing any time they want for all future development.
The FSF and the GPL protect us and we ask them voluntarily to do so. Your strange right wing distorted view on how things work is really f-ed up my friend (sarcastic on the "friend" part in case you missed that. I actually can't stand fiscal right wingers)
Member since:2007-01-04
I don't understand ESR to be fair. Basically, he says that we should use the BSD because no company wants to close their source code. So, if nobody wants to close the source code...why would people move away from the GPL, which keeps it open anyway?
Because the BSD license is more flexible, and you can use BSD licensed code within your already-proprietary products without any issues, but you can't do the same for GPL code (or, at least that's how it was explained to me, a lay person).
Edited to add quote.
Edited 2009-03-25 20:56 UTC
Member since:2005-07-22
So I wonder why we aren't all currently using *BSD if the GPL is such a hinderance ?
There are lots of projects that use BSD/MIT licenses, and are still active. Some names come to mind: Postgres, xorg, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Firefox, WebKit, GHC.
There's no reason for GPL, nothing to be gained from it.
Member since:2005-07-06
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Member since:
2006-01-10
So I wonder why we aren't all currently using *BSD if the GPL is such a hinderance ?