Re: "Licences Wars"

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] "Licences Wars"":
> Furthermore, I don't think the FOSS world is under any threat from proprietary 
> software vendors, that can be prevnted if I GPLed all my code. Can you cite 
> any possible substantial threat?

Thinking of future threats is hard (in the banking business, this is a whole
profession, and as you can see lately, the haven't been doing a very good
job. But as they say, "Hindsight is always 20:20", and it's easier to look
at the past.

And the experience of the last 20 years indeed shown that proprietary
software vendor's use of BSD has been a problem to free software. Not a huge
problem, certainly nothing that could ever kill free software, but a problem
nontheless.

Let me give you just a few examples.

In the second half of the 90s, X-Windows was quite popular - a department
(in universities, companies, etc.) would have strong Unix workstations
(from Sun, DEC, SGI, HP and other vendors) and people would have cheaper
machines showing the output from the strong machine using X-Windows. As
MS-Windows grew popular, people wanted to use their PC running Windows to
display X-Windows sessions. But unfortunately, the only X server available
for Windows was commercial software (Exceed), which could happen because X
was BSD-licensed and not GPL. Users (at the time, most had corporate or
university funds - they weren't home users) bit the bullet and paid. It took
literarly years before a free X server for Windows became available.

Another example - Mosix. Mosix (if you're familiar with it) was written over
a *proprietary* BSD variant called BSDI. Because the BSD licence allowed BSDI
to make it proprietary, and Mosix made the error in judgement (or, more
accurately, at the time of the judgement there weren't many alternatives)
of using it, for many years Mosix itself could not be made free software,
even though the people in the Hebrew University who developed it wanted to
do so.

Another less clear-cut example is the massive Unix diversity of the 90s.
A dozen companies, like Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, AT&T, SCO, BSDI, all created
their own variants of Unix and spent thousands of man-years on their
development. On the positive side, the Unix world was thriving because of
this diversity, but on the negative side, none of these thousands of man
years went into free software, and Richard Stallman and his friends had
to spend nearly a decade to replicate all this work. Is it surprising, then,
that Richard Stallman wanted to invent the copyleft license?

> > >  If they pose a threat (which I don't think they do), then
> > > no amount of keeping my code GPLed will prevent that threat.

The GPL is not trying to prevent free software from being destroyed, but
rather to "force" people and companies into spending their work into free
software, rather than proprietary software. And I think you can't deny it's
succeeding. The Linux kernel is the most obvious example - after decades
where every company created their own kernel or took a BSD-licensed kernel
and "appropriated" it, in the last decade there is a huge push for all
comapnies to work together on the open Linux kernel, and all these companies
are "forced" to contribute their work back to free software.


> For example, someone integrated my Freecell Solver library in a shareware 
> (without source) game he wrote titled Freecell 3D:
> 
> http://www.ambermango.com/php/am/f3d/index.php
> 
> He sells ths game online. It did not do any damage, because there are plenty 
> of Freecell implementations around. I on my part am pretty happy with the 
> open-source PySolFC.

Let's imagine that you wrote a great freecell solver library, but you suck at
UI and failed to create a graphical game based on that library, and wish that
someone created a UI on top of your library. If your library is BSD, someone
could create this UI but make it commercial and not even you can use it.
If your library is GPL, this person is forced to either make his code public
(so you and your friends can use it) or pay you for a new license.
Which of those scenarios will make you happier? I can't see how the GPL isn't
better in this scenario.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Sunday, Nov 23 2008, 25 Heshvan 5769
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The two rules for success are: 1. Never
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |tell them everything you know.