Re: Again: list of advantages of the xGPL

Roland <[email protected]> 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.

Not a great example, given that BSD had a penalized beginning, and considering:
  SGI has one foot in the grave with Red Hat staring at another 6 foot deep hole.
  What Sun's entry hasn't been seen yet, and IBM just dropped linux for its
portables.
Apple has probably already shipped more OSXs than all the companies you mentioned
(minus RedHat) has shipped Linux.  Linux *now* has a lead, for sure, but if you
count the devel dollars for companies porting / developing apps for OSX, I think
you will probably lose your bet.

> 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...

This is fine.  The problem is that various people try to rationalize this
preference with accusations about the other licenses that is simply not
true (like BSD is a license to steal, LGPL will let you get ALL the code back).
 
> 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.

What evidence have you seen to support what you just said?  Most people don't
CARE what the license is, so long as they can use it for free.  For most projects,
any contributions are minor compared to the codebase, so most programmers will
give it up to whatever the license the project uses, so I'm sure the number
of X11 (ie I don't care) programmers far exceed the number of GPL only programmers.
 
> 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.

You know, I keep hearing about this, but cannot recall *one* example where
this has ever happened.  Care to name an example?
 
> So how can you know? Reality is too complex. We see examples of GPL
> projects that are succesfull(Linux),

Stop using the plural if you are only going to cite ONE example.  

> and we see examples of BSD examples that are successfull(Apache, FreeBSD, etc...).

FYI, PHP4 went from GPL->Apache.

> 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...

It would make a difference.  Had apache been GPLed, it's unlikely that Sun, IBM,...
would financially contribute (you don't see them giving $$$ to FSF, do you?).
Can you name one non-kernel GPL component that can't be relicensed that IBM, SUN,
etc.,
has made?


-r