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Software Businesses

Is Apache Or GPL Better For Open-Source Business? 370

mjasay writes "While the GPL powers as much as 77% of all SourceForge projects, Eric Raymond argues that the GPL is 'a confession of fear and weakness' that 'slows down open-source adoption' because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond's argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy, an argument Michael Tiemann advocates, wouldn't it make sense to use the most open license? Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation suggests that there are few 'pure' GPL-only open-source projects, as GPL-prone developers have to 'modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.' But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL. The old GPL vs. BSD/Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities."
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Is Apache Or GPL Better For Open-Source Business?

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  • by maxume ( 22995 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:08AM (#27759601)

    The source availability provisions that come with distributing GPL software are a small pain for companies that want to make use of open source software, but that's about the biggest difference.

    Anyway, over time, it will become obvious how big a concern the copyleft is to businesses.

  • by fictionpuss ( 1136565 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:10AM (#27759623)

    Without people like RMS fighting for the cause, I don't think the center would have moved so far towards FOSS today.

    Supporting GPL in business is tougher, but it is also true that the benefits a company derives from open software are those it won't be able to reap in the future if the world turns back towards licenses which are less free.

  • Who's business? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:11AM (#27759639) Homepage

    If you are making money developing the software, the GPL with a dual liscence is a feature, not a bug:

    "Hey Mr Customer, you can have it for free under this GPL thingy, or pay us $$$ and do whatever you want with it"

    If you want to make money modifying the software, the GPL is a disaster.

  • by ActusReus ( 1162583 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:12AM (#27759643)

    If you're trying to get a protocol or "standard" of some kind as widely adopted as possible, then you should use a more permissive license (e.g. BSD, MIT, Apache). If you want people to embrace your product, yet then have to buy a license from you if they want to modify it in any proprietary way, you use the GPL.

    It's basically a business question of whether you plan to make money DIRECTLY from the code (i.e. GPL), or whether you have ulterior motives for making money elsewhere (i.e. Apache). For examples of the latter, most of the largest permissive-licensed projects (Apache, Firefox, etc) are bankrolled by Microsoft competitors as a means to block Microsoft from having full monopoly power in a particular niche.

    This really is a TIRED and boring flamewar. There simply is no "one license to rule them all". It depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

  • by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:15AM (#27759661) Homepage

    One thing the GPL offers that BSD-type licenses don't: protection from competitors. When a business releases it's code under a BSD-type license, it's competitors are free to take that code and expand upon it to make new products while keeping their code secret. As a business that means that you're always giving to your competitors but they don't have to give anything to you in return. The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him. You're never left holding the short end of the code-exchange stick. The only way a competitor can use your code without letting you use any improvements he makes is to not make any changes to your code at all. But if he's not making any changes or enhancements, you always have the first-mover advantage and he'll never be able to offer anything you aren't already offering. From a business standpoint, if you're going to open the source code at all the GPL provides assurance that the only way your competitors can hitch a free ride is if they accept always being in second place behind you when it comes to new features.

    That's assuming you can open the code in the first place. For code that's not critical to your business it's an easy answer. If the code is critical to your business, the first question you need to ask is whether or not you can open it to the world in the first place. Opening it means the entire world can see the exact thing that sets your business apart from others in that case, OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free. Keeping it closed means you can avoid revealing the keys to your success, OTOH it also means there's huge amounts of useful software out there that you can't use and will have to pay to get (either in cash to buy commercial versions or in time to duplicate the functionality). I can't say whether the trade-off's worth it for any particular business or not, but as a businessman you'd better be asking that question and getting a solid, well-grounded answer to it.

  • Apache or GPL? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SigILL ( 6475 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:16AM (#27759677) Homepage

    Yes.

  • by alexandre ( 53 ) * on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:21AM (#27759737) Homepage Journal

    How does having the ability to close down the product a better freedom?
    Actually with the GPL, you can dual license since it's your own software and thus have a free GPL version and then a privately extended version if that is what you business is looking to do...

    With BSD, well, all your concurrent company can do the same and compete in the proprietary version with you, how is that helping you?

    Raymond argues that GPL is bad because it's an uncertain license... what?
    If Cisco can't read that it has to distribute source code, well, that is a shame with all their lawyers.
    Anyone else KNOW what they have to do. So there is no ambiguity there!

    Same goes for Google's Android going with the Apache license...
    Basically in that super proprietary cell phone world, they are more than happy to have it under a BSD like license.
    Now every company can build an OS together and all close them on their side leaving you, the user, with nothing out of that openness except the base system which might well be unusable.

    See how MacOS X free part is free/useful compared to the full product? Haha! ...

    So they save on development cost, like they would have with the GPL but remove the idea that they want to guarantee that this investment will be guaranteed in the future.

    It's like a trap to win the cellphone OS race and then, when it's too late and they have such an insurmountable market share, they close it and we go back to business as usual...

    As a user i can't trust that, I'll go with Maemo, OpenMoko or anything that has as much GPL as possible if i have a choice!

    (which right now I don't really have, but this year is going to be interesting! I hope ...)

  • Re:Who's business? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PinkPanther ( 42194 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:24AM (#27759755)
    I wouldn't call it a "disaster", but it certainly becomes difficult to compete with the rights holders (if they are a single entity).

    You have identified the major points though:

    • GPL allows me to leverage the "free" model by getting my software into the hands of potential customers, letting them experiment or do initial implementations
    • GPL stops competitors from taking my product and using it to directly compete with me, at least initially

    The GPL does not preclude the open source community from forking and out innovating me. But any innovation done has to be done in the clear, assuming those changes are beyond "customizations" for a single customer.

  • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:25AM (#27759765) Homepage

    ...it'd be better for business, at least in the sense that more people would find commercial opportunities with it. But would that code be open source in the first place, were it not for the GPL? I doubt it. Most companies don't want to give away source competitors could put directly in their proprietary products. Give away GPL code? To use it means the competitors would have to open source their application, turning them into a service and support company rather than product sales, where you'll beat them on accrued skill and experience. I'd also say that a lot more individual contributors subscribe to "share and share alike" than "share and kthxbye". My point is that it's not like you got two equal options, either you use GPL code or you have to write it yourself because there is no such Apache code. Would be nice if there were, but then I'd like a pony too.

  • by trybywrench ( 584843 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:33AM (#27759857)
    I would say that when it comes to interoperability and standards compliance ( like a protocol ) then the GPL makes a lot of sense. With the GPL a business can't take the protocol, modify it, and then use market share to push their closed and modified version as the standard.

    My best guess for making money off open source is still support. If you provide pay-only features then you've got to be better than the very best programmer in the open source community. You'll always be in an arms race trying to introduce new features that customers will pay for faster then the community implements these same features in the open source version.

    With support you can provide a service that the open source community can't match which is basically a legally binding contract. Individuals would never buy the support and just head to the community for issues but a business will use the support contract as a hedge on the risk of using open source. The community has no contract and no obligation.

    Now making enough to live on is a whole other matter.
  • by coryking ( 104614 ) * on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:33AM (#27759861) Homepage Journal

    Eric is basically right. I've been burned in the past, so I now pay attention to the license an application uses (something you should get into the habit of doing).

    Here is my decision tree for deciding to use an application licensed under any FOSS license:

    1) If I plan to modify the application in any way, or use it as a library, it has to be under a BSD derived license. This means BSD, MIT, Apache, MSPL, Perl's artistic license, or anything similar. GPL, or any "viral" license is out... I dont touch GPL code anymore (actually, this is a lie, see below).

    1.1) There are exceptions to the "used as a library" rule. If everybody else is using said library in their application (eg: libmysql), nobody is gonna try to GPL-ize my whole application. And if they do go after me, it will only be because I'm so successful that I become a target for such nonsense. If your library is nothing more than a CPAN module and it is GPL, I can't use it, sorry.

    2) If I don't plan to modify the application for use in my project, the license becomes less important. In these cases, I look at other factors such as how active the project is. I don't like depending on projects that haven't been touched since 2005.

    3) If your application or code will become a non-linked dependency of my application (for example, a GPL'd version control system), I don't really care what the license is. Since it isn't linked into my application, I won't get "infected". In fact, I might even contribute to your GPL project provided my contributions are independent works and don't come out of my own "toolkit" so-to-speak.

    4) If you require me to assign copyright to you before I can contribute, you are a scam and can piss up a rope. Granted, many of the big-boys require this (most GNU stuff, Firefox(?), MySQL) and so I might be willing to cave in an contribute anyway provide what I'm contributing is an important bugfix and doesn't erode ownership my personal toolkit (i.e. the good stuff). The scam guys are companies who want ownership so they can cook up dual license schemes and profit from your work (MySQL). Scammers can pay for their own bugfixes...

    Bottom line, I won't touch GPL for anything that might make my mainline code become a derivative work and force it all to become GPL'd. BSD'sh licenses cannot do this to my mainline code, so I can use their stuff and contribute anything I think they will find useful. GPL doesn't let me cherry pick useful stuff out of my code, so they miss out on some pretty cool things. Since I dont like leeching from GPL stuff (using it, but having no way to give back), I just avoid it instead.

    In other words, if you GPL your project, $SUPER_BIG_COMPANY can't lift your code and make $MILLIONS$ but only at a heavy cost--the pool of people who are able to work on your project becomes much, much smaller. BSD-style licenses are attractive to business precisely because business knows they can contribute changes without getting into trouble. If I use a BSD anything, I know that I have the option to deeply embed the code into my application, still be able to contribute back any changes, and retain control over my intellectual property. GPL reduces control over my IP and thus I can only depend on it in the loosest way possible. The second I want to make any contributions, depending on how I used the GPL code, my entire portfolio might be in legal jeopardy. Not cool.

    PS: IANAL

  • by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:35AM (#27759903)

    I think we have to ask: What has the GPL done for us, or at least probably done for us?

    Starting a decade ago several very large corporations poured significant resources into Linux development, and were compelled to keep their contributions open-licensed and essentially free (as in beer).

    Do we think that would have been the case if Linux had been Apache or BSD-licensed, or would we instead see a division into deluxe IBMLinux (that works on multi-processors and new chips and 64-bit) and open Linux that scrapes along on simple 486 hardware.

  • by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:37AM (#27759913) Journal

    That's an odd view... personally, I think what really matters is that you can't make money with the code. Money comes from controlling a resource that is scarce. Money requires poverty as a precursor. Wealth comes from abundance.

    The argument in the article misses the point when they keep talking about code quality, efficiency and market forces, because the GPL isn't about creating higher quality code. The GPL is about protecting something that is naturally abundant from the corrupting influences of law and commerce.

    If you want to create artificial scarcity that is manifested, you use closed source distribution. You can't remove a law and create abundance, you need to actually kick in their door and download the source off their server. You don't get to have people who are outside your little conspiracy I mean corporation help with the work, and that's the cost you pay.

    If you want to create artificial scarcity that is not manifested, but enforced by goons with guns from the BSA, you use an "Open Source" license. The code is out there, everyone could theoretically draw advantage from it immediately, but we're forced to pay to support the goons who watch us and prevent us from doing so. If you aren't already using other legal mechanisms to enforce your right to control the code, you're an idiot who just gave some group of patent trolls a present that will be used against you.

    One could argue that this is the worst case scenario... better never to give you a car than to give it to you, tell you you're not permitted to use it, appoint guards to watch you day and night to catch and punish you if you do drive the car, and finally force you to feed the guards with your taxes.

    If you want to create abundance, you distribute under a "Free Software" license, like the GPLv3. The code is out there, everyone can draw advantage from it immediately, except groups that are involved in creating manufactured poverty in your field are obligated to stop if they wish to participate.

    Those groups are caught in a situation where the poisonous system that grants a thin veneer of legitimacy to their claims of entitlement is turned against them, and they are forced to either drift into irrelevance and be disempowered or ditch the layers of misdirection and exercise the violence that is the basis of their control overtly rather than covertly and indirectly.

    That is what Free Software is all about, and why Open Source isn't good enough.

  • by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:39AM (#27759937)

    "Whenever we use anything that is open source the first thing is to ensure it is not GPL'd. If it is GPL'd we find another solution or write our own."

    That's the idea, dummy.

    If you're not going to reciprocate, then write your own!

  • by coryking ( 104614 ) * on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:42AM (#27759987) Homepage Journal

    If the software is the means to some other end

    i.e. you want to have your cake and eat it too. i.e. dual licenses schemes like MySQL's. i.e. you want to sell your GPL code.

    then yes, the GPL or some derivative would seem to make the most sense

    For you "owner" of the code, yeah--especially if you are extra weasely and require copyright assignment. For contributors, it is a scam. Why the hell should I contribute to your dual licensed garbage so you can turn around and profit from my work? I never understood why such companies aren't hassled more about this. It is really a great scam--you get a bunch of people contributing to your work for free and you get to sell it all. Course, I guess the same holds true for most things on the internet--flickr doesn't take pictures, its users do and flickr profits from that. Slashdot doesn't have a script to write comments, we write them and they profit from that. So I might be wrong on this... but the dual-license guys seem way more blatant, probably because I get a lot of satisfaction posting here, but dont really get much satisfaction contributing to some faceless corporations open source project.

    The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation

    A sucky one though. I doubt many programmers on this board want to be in a position that the work they produce for a company is essentially worthless and the way to move up is through the tech support department. I also doubt customers would benefit either since giving away the software and charging for support creates an incentive to make shoddy software that requires a lot of hand-holding.

  • This is what happens when people used to getting attention miss the attention when their 15 minutes is up.

    No one has payed attention to Eric Raymond in years so now he has to start a flame war.

  • by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy@nOSPAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:51AM (#27760107)

    If it's just a tool, the GPL makes sense, so you get contributions back.

    The GPL doesn't make sense if your software gives you a competitive advantage, because by releasing your code under the GPL, you relinquish that competitive advantage.

  • by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:53AM (#27760129)

    I always thought that was the idea -

    "If you want to use my stuff in your project, you have to open it. Feel free to write your own if that doesn't fit in with your plans"

  • by jeremyp ( 130771 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:56AM (#27760187) Homepage Journal

    The GPL, by contrast, allows your competitor to use your code as the basis for their enhanced product only if they give you their code in return. That means that whenever your competitor uses your code to gain a competitive advantage, you can grab his code in return and match him.

    That's actually not true. There's no obligation in the GPL for your competitor to give you any of their source code unless they, or one of their customers, or somebody else downstream, redistributes the code to you. Since they are allowed to charge a fee for the software, you might find yourself having to pay to see their code changes. Or if you can't find anybody prepared to give you or sell you a copy of the software, you may never get the changes.

  • by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @11:58AM (#27760215)

    If you look at big companies like IBM who have really embraced OSS, they have done so precisely because of the GPL. The GPL is really the only license that makes a lot of business sense. The GPL has two major advantages over other licenses. First since you own the copyright you can dual license the code as proprietary and GPL if you wish, while making sure that code can continue to be developed by a community and protected from exploitation---the only caveat here being that you have to make sure copyrights are always assigned to you, something that many projects do. The second major advantage is that no company can use your code against you in a competitive manner. The playing field is completely level. If improving your code helps a competitor, it also helps you. Given all this, if I was a commercial company, wanted to have my projects be open source, and I owned all the copyrights, then it's a no brainer. the GPL is the only way to go. It seems like the only time people complain about the GPL is when they don't happen to have a natural copyright to the code and for some reason feel some sense of entitlement to code (if it's open source I should be able to use it how I want, dang it) just because it's OSS. It's very bizarre.

    Frankly I'm surprised to hear of such blatant FUD coming from someone like ESR. I think the solution to FUD is to be a bit more vocal about defending what the GPL is actually about and how it protects users, developers, *and* commercial corporations. It's not public domain software. It's source code just like source code from any other source. If it's not yours and you don't want to abide by the license, buy rights to the code or stop complaining.

  • by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:00PM (#27760253) Homepage

    OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free.

    Not really. That's the theory, but in reality what it means is that nothing prevents such a development department from forming spontaneously. In reality, many open source projects languish because no one is interested in developing for them, and there's no management in place to guide the developers to plan a roadmap for the project. High-profile, successful open source projects like Linux, Mozilla, and Pidgin didn't happen by accident.

    You have to have people who understand the project, its purpose and goals, and have technical expertise in coding, and who are interested in contributing to the project and see a need to do it, or who are paid to do so.

    If you're a company and you want to foster this sort of environment, one of the best things you can do is set aside some budget to pay coders for contributions that make it into the trunk of the project, or, you know, hire a few full-time developers to work on your project.

    Simply putting the code out there and wishing isn't going to get you very far. Although, at least that way, when you go out of business, anyone who used to depend on your company for support can come along and pick up the project code and do something with it. Which is better than nothing, I guess. Far better to fertilize your project by putting incentives out there for programmers and users to take interest, than to simply open the codebase up and wait for magic to happen.

  • by coryking ( 104614 ) * on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:11PM (#27760415) Homepage Journal

    They dont make much from us clicking on the ads either. People who bother do register accounts become blind to them.

    Slashdot doesn't directly make money from us writing comments. The indirectly make money from us because our comments give a reason for people to visit. Without them, the website wouldn't be interesting and nobody would visit... thus making this place unattractive to advertisers.

  • by replicant108 ( 690832 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:11PM (#27760421) Journal

    The second I want to make any contributions, depending on how I used the GPL code, my entire portfolio might be in legal jeopardy.

    Firstly, "making contributions" does not normally trigger the GPL.

    Secondly, the GPL does not put your portfolio "in legal jeopardy". The worst case scenario is that you have to remove (somebody else's) GPL'ed code from your portfolio.

    Finally, it is copyright law which makes this a requirement, not GPL.

  • by DaleGlass ( 1068434 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:12PM (#27760437) Homepage

    The whole argument about which is more free is lame semantics.

    I use the GPL because it does what I want. Whether you call that "freedom", "restrictions" or "communism" is completely irrelevant.

    I don't choose a license because of its freedom value, but because it does what I want.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:38PM (#27760815)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Re:Realities (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaleGlass ( 1068434 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @12:58PM (#27761095) Homepage

    Honestly, what's the problem with BSD over GPL? So I take a BSD kernel (for example), hack it up with my fancy mods, resell it as a proprietary product. I am required to note, hey, this product uses BSD software under the hood. Any competitor is free to grab the same base software, and apply his own talents to competing with me.

    The problem is that there's no incentive to contribute. You can take, but nothing makes you give back. Especially because if you give back, you're effectively working for your competitors.

    So yeah, BSD is excellent from a "leech" point of view. It's not that good from the "project" point of view. It's not that good from the contributor point of view either. Why should I bother contributing when that in effect makes me an unpaid employee of every company using that source?

    I take a a GNU product, apply some of my special magic to it, and I'm screwed (businesswise, at least). I have to give away any enhancements I make. Blah. LGPL at least lets me use compilers, interpreted languages, libraries, and so on, as a bit of dodge. (I feel LGPL only exists because if it didn't, everybody would run screaming from GPL, and it would have died long ago. I can't link to a freakin' library without releasing my code? No thanks.)

    The LGPL exists for a strategic reason.

    For some things, such as the C library, there exist many reimplementations. Making that GPLd drives people to alternatives, and loses on any potential contributions. So the LGPL is a compromise to still get contributions to that code.

    Stallman considers that a library should be GPLd when it provides a competitive advantage. If it's GPL or "code your own", he hopes you'll go with the GPL one.

    In a perfect happy world where all our needs and wants and income is taken care of, GPL all the way, man... But in world where one has to express one's talents to make a living, the socialistic ideal of GPL just doesn't jive with business.

    On the contrary, it jives perfectly fine with business.

    Take Red Hat for instance, and other companies that pay for GPL development. Why do they do that? Because they know that even if IBM takes advantage of their improvements, the moment they fix something in Red Hat's code, they have to give back as well. So not only does Red Hat get better drivers or SMP support, they also get free fixes from IBM for it!

    The BSD on the other hand doesn't have such things. Red Hat would write their driver, release as closed source, not contribute it back obviously, and every other company would do the same. The end result is that BSD won't get the driver until some volunteer happens to contribute it.

    There's also lots of GPLd code in various devices you rarely look at very closely, such as cash registers. The companies that work for those don't sell code. They sell hardware + software + support, and have no problem with contributing bugfixes for whatever GPLd code they used, because their business loses nothing by doing so. And without the GPL they wouldn't bother to contribute, because that takes programmer time, and as such won't be done if optional.

    In practice, I use GPL'd software a lot, and I am appreciative. But other than for the odd bug fix, I shy away from *ever* touching the source code, period; from a business standpoint, it'd be death.

    It's only death if your business is selling software on the shelf. There are many companies with different business models, which sell routers, or cash registers, or support, and for which the GPL isn't a hindrance in the slightest.

    On BSD style code I've used, I've gone in, made enhancements, and redistributed things; and when I found bugs in the core of the stuff I've worked with, I've contributed back. (But not my new, proprietary enhancements.) So I've been motivated to contribute more to the BSD-style-license world, than the GPL one.

  • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:04PM (#27761183) Homepage Journal

    In other words, if you GPL your project, $SUPER_BIG_COMPANY can't lift your code and make $MILLIONS$

    They can't "lift" it as in deprive you of it, but they couldn't do that with BSD or for that matter the good old public domain, either. But they very much CAN produce a competing product based on it, then make millions supporting it while your product fails because it's not as good. You don't understand the GPL or copyright at all for that matter if you don't understand the distinction between theft and copyright infringement.

    GPL reduces control over my IP and thus I can only depend on it in the loosest way possible. The second I want to make any contributions, depending on how I used the GPL code, my entire portfolio might be in legal jeopardy. Not cool.

    I'm not sure why you think you should be able to use GPL code without respecting the wishes of the rights holders, but "in legal jeopardy" is a bit of an overstatement. Only the pieces in which you used GPL code will be up for debate. Even then you need only remove the GPL code and replace it with something else; it's not like you need to start over.

    You may or may not have points in the rest of your comment, but this part is pure FUD. You never have to do anything to comply with the GPL until you distribute something that contains GPL code. This is considerably more free than the default situation in which you are not permitted to use someone else's code at all. Complaining that you have less rights over someone else's code than when they license under BSD/MIT/Artistic/whatever is true but obvious and thus uninteresting.

  • by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:05PM (#27761191) Homepage
    Frankly I'm surprised to hear of such blatant FUD coming from someone like ESR.

    Frankly I'm surprised that YOU'RE surprised. ESR's a fruitcake, and he's been spewing this kind of idiocy for years.
  • by TrekkieGod ( 627867 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:05PM (#27761193) Homepage Journal

    Your assertion that I'd have to suffer the "punishment" of writing my own is a false dichotomy that hinges on me either being able to "write my own" or use GPL code. This isn't the case.

    It's true there are other open source licenses, but if you're looking a GPL project, there's only one of that project, and it might be the only one (or the best one) that suits you. If you can find an alternative, with a license more suitable for your needs, go ahead.

    Don't think of it as "punishment." If I write something and GPL it, and you want to use it, I'm allowing you to use it provided you fulfill the conditions I establish. You do the same thing with your super-duper proprietary source portfolio that you don't want to open up. If I want to use it, you'll allow me to use it, as long as I fulfill your conditions (give you money, don't distribute the derived work as GPL, etc.).

    The reason you're at odds with the GPL isn't because it's a bad open source license, but rather because you obviously have fundamental philosophical differences. You talk about how using the GPL "reduces control over your IP." Of course it does: the entire motivation behind the GPL is that the concept of "Intellectual Property" is flawed, in that there can be no such thing. If it's not a physical thing, it cannot be property, and you shouldn't have any control over it. However, if you want to play the control over code game, we'll use the system to enforce that any code we write remains open. Thus, copyleft was born.

    If you don't believe that's right, if you believe you have the right to maintain control over the code you wrote, then you have a fundamental philosophical difference with the FSF, and you're not going to like the GPL. If you agree with the FSF, then the GPL is the license for you. If you want to run a business, you do whatever is going to get you the most money, and that depends on exactly what it is that you're selling. If you want to run a business AND you agree with the FSF, then again, the GPL is for you, because your ability to make money does not (and should not) trump your morals.

  • Re:Realities (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:06PM (#27761213)

    I take a a GNU product, apply some of my special magic to it, and I'm screwed (businesswise, at least). I have to give away any enhancements I make.

    That's the whole point. The guys that put in work for free don't want you taking their base and making alterations and then selling it with no obligations to give away your enhancements. The companies that put time and money into GPL software don't want that either, they contributed to the community and the condition for you getting the source and using the software is that you open up too.

    That's the condition for using their work. Don't like it? Find or write another solution.

    So many posts here seem to think that GPL code ought to be able to be used as if it was public domain. That's not the idea at all.

    Things like the linksys hacking communities would not exist without the GPL.

  • by david_thornley ( 598059 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:09PM (#27761249)

    Amazing - an intelligent comment in a discussion like this.

    However, I think the GPL has advantages for the long-term efficiency. It doesn't fit in to current standard business practices as BSD does, but it can offer Free Software a competitive advantage, and therefore can lure people into the open source paradigm, which many of us think superior (and which I'm perfectly willing to accept for the sake of argument). In addition, it encourages some contributions by reducing the chance that the contributor will feel ripped off. Whether and how these advantages compare to the advantages of the BSD license is another question, and worthy of intelligent discussion (not that that's likely to happen).

    The BSD license does fit better into current existing business models, but those are essentially closed source/proprietary, so it's not clear to me that it encourages open source production as much as ESR seems to think, at least in the long term. With BSD, there is a distinct chance that improvements may vanish into closed source, never to be seen again, which more or less balances the distinct chance that commercial developers avoid improving copylefted software.

    My personal belief is that the GPL, LGPL, and BSD-type licenses all have uses.

  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) * <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:14PM (#27761353) Homepage Journal

    Say, in theory, that you decide to fund your company by supporting a single Open Source product. Put yourself in the customer's place:

    The customer will have to spend a lot of time just figuring out what is breaking, so that he or she knows who to call.

    The customer will then have to spend additional time proving to the vendor that something is broken in their product, while the vendor points elsewhere: hardware, OS, someone else's product.

    The customer will have to manage integrating all of these piece-mal support companies into their own support solution.

    This is total hell for the customer.

    So, it works out that to offer support on a single Open Source product, the vendor has to make a deal with an integrator who will service everything, both hardware and software, and funnel business to the vendor.

    But the vendor would rather make a larger profit by using their own resources when possible.

    So, the one-product Open Source company doesn't succeed in offering support business, long term.

    There is one Open Source company that pays dividends today. That's Red Hat. Most of them make a big noise, but aren't terribly profitable if at all. Once in a while we get one of them to admit it.

    Fortunately you don't need companies to make Open Source.

  • This isn't accurate. While the GPL lets you charge, it doesn't let you keep the person you give the software from giving away your product for free. So it essentially poisons a proprietary business method. That is why dual-licensing works.
  • There is an easy answer to this. Don't make the software as your business. Most of the successful Open Source applications are made by Open Source projects in which businesses participate, not businesses whose goal is to make the software.

    Am I saying that Open Source business doesn't work? Most of the time it does not. It depends on what you are doing.

  • Many dual-licensed projects are perfectly happy to accept patches, as long as you sign over the copyright or the right to relicense, and swear that you are the author of work and don't know of any infringements in it.

    The problem is motivating people to sign that. I think I know a way, but I'm still working on the product for my new company so don't yet have proof.

  • by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:34PM (#27761651) Homepage

    I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise. Any idiot can set up a web server and mail drop, and they are free to use the same tools we use. It takes a bit more dedication to do a kickass job of it, and that's where we stand.

    If a business feels "threatened" by the GPL, maybe they need to stop selling artificially-rarefied bits. That business model has been slowly collapsing for nearly 30 years.

  • by Burkin ( 1534829 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @01:39PM (#27761733)

    I guess you're right in principle (as both a reciprocal licences and therefore encourage dual-licencing) but the GPL is scary to a lot of people and its not the best written licence in that a lot of its content is in the preamble which has no legal standing so far as I understand.

    Well you understand wrongly. The GPL has been upheld in courts in multiple countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL#The_GPL_in_court [wikipedia.org]

    The GPL reads more like a manifesto than a licence. As a company, it is not our stance that we want to abolish the evil capitalist software market in favour of a socialist or libertarian anarchic utopia :) it just suits our purposes to have the code out there and to have a good reason to undercut the competition.

    That's perfectly fine if you want to do so for an ideological reason, but the objections you raised in the previous post have no bearing on your company as the copyright holder of the code.

  • It's simple really (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @02:27PM (#27762287) Homepage Journal

    If you want to make your software free of restrictions, then place it under a BSD, MIT, Apache or other unencumbered license. But if you desire to control, regulate and manage what other people can do with your software, then use a restrictive license like the GPL. Many businesses like the GPL because they can be "community based" while still restricting their competitor's ability to leverage the software.

    What I have never understood, though, was the use of the GPL for non-commercial community software. The usual excuse is that "Microsoft can't steal my code". That displays a shocking ignorance of the nature of information. No one can take your software away from you, or away from your users. They might be able to fork it, but your original software is still there untouched. The reciprocity of the GPL can be very useful, as with commercial open source, but it has nothing to do with protecting the software. Instead it protects the fragile sensibilities of the author.

    ESR is one who gets it, who understands that free software does not need to be protected and coddled beneathed layers of licensing restrictions. Anything beyond attribution and warranty disclaimers is too much.

  • Re:Realities (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaleGlass ( 1068434 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @03:06PM (#27762745) Homepage

    Let's start with the last phrase: you are not working for others, since you are selling a product yourself. Right there you made a factual, conceptual mistake.

    That assumes I have a product. What if I'm just an user?

    Where's my incentive to contribute something that your company will repackage and sell?

    Second, you assume, as a premise, that there are no incentives in contributing. But it easily seen that the incentives might lie in contributing to the maintenance of a common source tree which would otherwise be too laborious to maintain yourself. This constitutes a rational, work-related reason, totally alien to one's political views of the world (which seems to be part of the GPL thing).

    I consider that a very weak incentive.

    Yes, of course it's easier to contribute a one line fix for a buffer overrun, than to manually patch every new version.

    You however have a big incentive not to contribute anything that might make you more competitive.

    Long term this sort of thing will result in all the interesting technology being in the proprietary forks, and an open codebase that doesn't do anything interesting, but runs well.

    Furthermore, the modifications I make give me an exclusive edge, because of customizations that might only be relevant to me, due to circumstances, not to the majority.

    And here, again, why I don't release BSD code. I don't want you to have an exclusive edge, I want you to contribute to my project.

  • by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@ear ... .net minus punct> on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @03:13PM (#27762865)

    FWIW, I'm approx. familiar with both licenses, and I expect most FOSS developers are. I prefer GPL ... actually, these days I'm leaning towards either GPL3 or AGPL, but I recognize the Apache license as a good one. Just one that's a bit more open to being ripped off than I prefer.

    For a business, it seems to me the important consideration would be what you want to do. You need the right code, and it's a lot easier if you can just modify slightly something already done. And in that case you must use whatever license that code is under. (Unless you are just using it as a library or some such.)

    If you are publishing FOSS code, the only reason for the Apache (or BSD) license is if it's important to you to get wide adoption. E.g., some code implementing standards was published under BSD *specifically* because that allowed proprietary applications to include it. The primary goal was to get the standard widely adopted.

    So it all depends on what you are doing and why. But for MY general purposes, it's either GPL3 or AGPL...except when I need to use a different license because I'm adapting pre-existing code.

  • by bkuhn ( 41121 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @04:01PM (#27763527) Homepage

    Even after years of conversations with us in the FLOSS community, Matt still doesn't get it. He's completely focused on “businesses with a codebase that release it under some license”. He doesn't understand community-driven software that isn't tied to on specific corporate entity.

    The GPL is specifically designed for community-driven software that is not tied to one company. Matt could very well be right about the limited, pro-corporate world he occupies; it could very well be better for them to use the Apache license.

    However, individuals and very small contracting agencies benefit best when they can be put on equal footing with the big guys. The only types of licenses that do this are copyleft licenses.

    Finally, declaring that people's life's work trying to make the world a better place — even if you disagree with their politics — is disingenuous at best. I've spent most of my adult life working to make the GPL and the codebases around it better. I'm sorry to hear that Matt thinks I've been busy dumping radioactive waste on his world.

  • by mkcmkc ( 197982 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @04:14PM (#27763733)

    But the second you want to distribute it, anything that the GPL considers a derivative work becomes GPL. And *that* is why some people, like myself, prefer to avoid GPL.

    The only way that something you write can "become GPL" is for you to choose to license it under the GPL. There is no other way under heaven or earth for this to happen. If you've heard otherwise, you've been misinformed.

    Using the GPL takes away the *option* of ever being able to distribute our work without making it GPL.

    You seem to be saying that if I choose the GPL as the license for my software, I've removing your ability to redistribute software that you derive from mine under a non-GPL license. If so, yes, that is correct. That is the price I'm charging for allowing you to derive from my work. (If you ask me with a good reason, I might allow something else, but that's the default.)

    If I start using the GPL in my code, my option to distribute my codebase under a license of my choosing goes out the window

    No. You can distribute your code under the GPL and then switch to another license at any time for future versions. What you cannot do is redistribute my GPL'ed code under the license of your choice.

  • My customers are putting Linux in new car dashboards and cell phones.
  • by rtfa-troll ( 1340807 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @06:14PM (#27765157)

    You can take BSD licenced code and keep it - no upward financial contribution required,

    You're more or less imaging what he's trying to say. The person who released the code that Apple then took is getting no benefit from Apple using the code.

    In fact, it's pretty difficult for Apple to give them benefit even if they want to. Since companies are supposed to work for a profit, every major code contribution to a BSD project should really be weighed up, comparing the benefit it migh give to the competition againts the maintenance benefits of sharing. Since that's a pretty difficult calculation to make it needs serious effort and so most programmers just take (short term) the easy option and don't bother. Long term this means that BSD projects inside corporations tend to end up dead or proprietary.

    Overall that means that BSD is a poor license for a company to release under or make long term commitments to. It's a good license for taking small bits of code for other projects, however.

  • by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Wednesday April 29, 2009 @10:23PM (#27767525) Homepage

    Communistic? The GPL? I don't know, I don't think you can get more communistic than the view that code other people develop should be handed over to you for your benefit just because you "need" it. Those of us who favor the GPL take a more capitalistic view: if you want something I created, you're going to need to give me something of value to me in exchange.

  • Read the complaint [fsf.org]. Don't do the stupid obvious license violations alleged in the complaint. Then you'll be fine.

    Nobody violates a Free Software / Open Source license for a smart reason. Cisco hasn't got their compliance act together.

  • by reashlin ( 1370169 ) on Thursday April 30, 2009 @06:42AM (#27770429)

    Right, so all those times Sun took BSD code and closed it screwing over the users, doesn't count? Or SGI? Or BSDI. Or MicroSoft.

    Sorry who has been screwed over here. I don't remember Sun stopping me using the code as well. Just not their changes to the code. I have lost nothing - you have lost nothing - the original author has lost nothing. We have all gained with Sun, Microsoft etc having better code.

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