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:2009-08-26
If it is good code then they should use it; NIH is patently silly. On a community level it is clearly exploitative even if bsd developers allow this.
Who is being exploited? BSD developers create code with the expectation that this will happen. Their goal is to create good open source code, not obsess over where it might end up.
As was pointed out before, there are many ways to profit from GPL code without giving anything to the developers. Hardware companies do it all the time. Are they exploiting GPL developers?
Member since:2005-07-06
There are the ongoing rumors that the windows networking stack is spattered with bits of bsd code. They are clearly allowed to do it, but it seems somewhat miserly that one of the most open source unfriendly company's (not to mention biggest) does not contribute back, that is, if they do use the code. On a technical level I approve. If it is good code then they should use it; NIH is patently silly. On a community level it is clearly exploitative even if bsd developers allow this.
If people checked rather than repeat the rumors, the rumors would cease. There was BSD code in the network stack of original release of NT. Microsoft licensed the code from a company called Spider Systems. Microsoft later wrote their own network stacks for subsequent versions of Windows (IIRC, rewrites occured for 3.5, 2000, and Vista) that contained no BSD code with the exception of some commandline utilities that remained from the Spider code.
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Member since:
2008-03-17
There are the ongoing rumors that the windows networking stack is spattered with bits of bsd code. They are clearly allowed to do it, but it seems somewhat miserly that one of the most open source unfriendly company's (not to mention biggest) does not contribute back, that is, if they do use the code.
On a technical level I approve. If it is good code then they should use it; NIH is patently silly. On a community level it is clearly exploitative even if bsd developers allow this.
Edited 2009-09-02 23:24 UTC