Re: Again: list of advantages of the xGPL

At 10:27 PM 6/19/02 -0500, Sean C. Farley wrote:
>On Wed, 19 Jun 2002 19:31, Roland wrote:
> > 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).

Look, I didn't say that the BSDL hasn't its merits. I just gave an example 
of a successfull GPL project where there is an BSD equivalent. And in the 
example of Linux you can see that the BSD pie is NOT larger. So your 
assumption(that the BSD pie would be larger than the GPL equivalent) is 
wrong, at least in the general case.

Personally I also like the BSDL more, although I have to agree that the GPL 
has also its merits and MAYBE in some situations it is superior.

In practice it is hard to come to a conclusion because I just came to 
realize that there is a huge number of factors involved in licensing. And 
worse, it are always humans that decide which license to apply to a 
project, or, if the project already exists they will decide if they wanna 
join the project. Sometimes those decisions are not entirely rational. Some 
people might prefer the GPL just because they sympathise with its ideology 
etc...

It may happen that objectively a BSDL would be better for a given project, 
but in practice it might turn out that only few developers will join 
because many are biased towards the GPL. So if you choose the GPL you will 
suddenly attract much more coders.

On the other hand you may choose the BSDL and a company starts using the 
codebase and giving back many improvements, so the BSDL proves successfull.
BUT on the same scenario it may also happen that a company doesn't give 
back many improvements, hires away the best developers of that project and 
leaves it to stagnation while the proprietary fork is steadily improving.

So how can you know? Reality is too complex. We see examples of GPL 
projects that are succesfull(Linux), and we see examples of BSD examples 
that are successfull(Apache, FreeBSD, etc...).

Imagine for a minute that Linux where under the BSDL and Apache, FreeBSD 
where GPLed. I dare to say it wouldn't make much of a difference for those 
projects. Please prove me wrong...

Roland