Re: Again: list of advantages of the xGPL

At 03:02 PM 6/19/02 -0400, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
>On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Roland wrote:
>
> > As an analogy lets think of a city with and without police. Where would
> > you like to live?
>
>Ideally, a city that doesn't NEED police in the first place.  (Granted,
>that's not likely to happen.)  If you could truly trust everyone, police
>would be unnecessary.  Since you usually can't, they ARE necessary.

Exactly, and that's why it sometimes makes sense to have a license like the 
GPL, although we could be much happier with a BSD style license. Yesterday 
I read an interview from an IBM Linux hacker in Slashdot. He said that they 
are improving Linux together with folks from other companies like SGI, 
etc... I think in this scenario it is important to have the GPL to avoid 
abuse...

> > RedHat, etc...
> > And please don't forget that one of the driving forces of switching 
> WINE to
> > LGPL was a company!
>
>So?  Maybe it was a strategic business advantage to them.

Sure. The topic of my email was: list of advantages of the xGPL.

> > I'm not saying the BSD has not its advantages, but in the case of WINE it
> > seems that many where not happy with what was released by TG, at least
> > there was a lot of debate generated around this.
>
>Would the Transgaming situation have played out much differently under the
>LGPL, though?  If they wanted to follow the "Street Performers Protocol"
>under the LGPL, they'd be unable to release ANY code until meeting their
>threshold.  How would this have really been an improvement?

If I understood correctly, under the LGPL they would HAVE TO release their 
improvements.

> > Yes exactly. I was refering to the case when a company A hires a software
> > company B to produce some specific software for company A. If there is a
> > xGPL program that already fulfills part of the functionality, B can 
> deliver
> > the software at a much lower cost, by just extending that software. With
> > the xGPL the community will get back everything. Of course A could decide
> > it doesn't want to release everything back, in which case B had to either
> > start programming from scratch(at a much higher cost) or try to find an
> > equivalent software under BSDL. In this case I see a clear point in favour
> > of the xGPL, at least from the viewpoint of the community.
>
>It's easy to see the advantage to the community, IF development happens
>under the xGPL.  That's a big "if", though.  The question is what advantage
>it has for whoever is PAYING for that development, and that's less obvious.

One advantage I see is, that because ALL the code is released back to the 
community the PAYING Customer will benefit from all improvements and 
BUG-FIXES made to that code.
Another advantage is for other companies in the same business(potential 
paying customers). They could use that solution without having to pay 
anything. So I see a lot of companies profiting.

> > If the company will avoid any xGPLed software the development cost will be
> > much higher since it cannot use the large amount of available xGPLed
> > software. This is also a reason why it is good to make the amount of 
> xGPLed
> > software as big as possible. At least from this viewpoint.
>
>Yes, it's an incentive for the GPL community to try to become dominant,
>just like Microsoft's interests are served by trying to become (and remain)
>dominant.  If GPL code can achieve monopoly-style advantages, it will be
>more powerful, obviously.  It will also be more dangerous.

Dangerous for whom? It will help a lot of companies because they will have 
access to a lot of software for free. There will be a lot of need for 
programmers to customize/adapt free software for specific needs. So who is 
in danger here?

>The question is, what are the incentives to fund new xGPL development?
>(The incentives for exploiting previous xGPL developmenbt are obvious.)

Like any incentive to fund new software development. When there is a big 
enough need for it.
And honestly I don't believe that we will ever reach the point where there 
is no need for further software development. I see it here at the company. 
Mostly I develop software for trivial tasks like reading a text file and 
sending the data to a database. There will always be need for specific 
software that solves very specific problems.

> > >Still, I won't question that the natural inclination of companies will be
> > >at first NOT to return any code under the BSD license.  However, over time
> > >they're likely to realize that the cost of maintaining a code fork for any
> > >non-strategic code is foolish to bear, and the benefits are such that
> > >releasing that code is often the best business decision.  It's true that
> > >strategic code won't be release.  (Although it might eventually become
> > >non-strategic code and finally be released at that point.)
> >
> > Yes, like TG releasing D3D code in five years or so...
>
>That's better than never getting it.  And you're free to write it first and
>not wait on them...

Yes, and I'm free also to put that code under the LGPL :)

> > The difference is, that if an LGPL project forks, the license is usually
> > maintained, so every fork can also benefit from the work in other forks.
> > With BSDL this is not the case, since some forks can be proprietary.
>
>True, but the natural inefficiencies of maintained forked codebases tends
>to mitigate against this to a certain degree, while the increased profit
>incentive encourages adoption by proprietary interests, who might tend to
>release non-strategic code back to the public project.
>
>Back to the original question: which is better, 100% of a smaller pie or a
>fraction of a much larger pie?

You assume that the BSD pie will be larger. But in practice I see the 
opposite happening in some cases. Take Linux for example. There is a list 
of big companies supporting/developing Linux: IBM, SGI, Red Hat, SUN, etc...
If the BSDL was really superior then all these companies would be 
using/improving FreeBSD instead. I would bet now that the company funded 
improvements on Linux are much bigger than the FreeBSD related ones. So we 
are getting 100% of a BIG PIE with the GPL.

Roland