Re: Again: list of advantages of the xGPL

On Wed, 19 Jun 2002 19:31, Roland wrote:

> 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...

IBM gives code to Apache.  Why would this scenario be different?

> > > 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.

They probably would never have existed in the first place.  This would
have resulted in a loss of jobs.

<snip>

> > > 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.

As proof that the license did not make Linux, the license that Red Hat
Database (PostgreSQL) is under is the BSD license.  I bet the company
funded improvements on PostgreSQL will be higher than MySQL (under GPL).

Sean
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