On 11 Feb 2014, at 11:25, Rogelio Serrano <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't really care about current closed source companies. That's a mistake, because in the real world there is no such thing as a closed-source company and an open-source company. Microsoft has contributed code to FreeBSD, Red Hat has some proprietary products. The question should not be 'does your company have a long-term philosophy to software licensing that I agree with', it's 'can we usefully cooperate to improve the Free Software ecosystem'. To me, one of the core philosophies of open source is the observation that cooperation can produce better results than competition. > I'm learning how to engineer compilers precisely because of LLVM. C++ makes > me want to pull my hair out by the roots. Slowly. If you think C++ is bad, take a look at what happens when you try to write a compiler in C. It's even less pretty. > They do it because they can. Until we can gain more power by hook or by crook > that will always be the case. A machiavellian approach is needed. Or we could try enlightened self-interest. Companies contribute to FreeBSD because it's cheaper for them to do so than to maintain a private fork. Over the last couple of years, we've had some big contributions from companies that had maintained private forks for a long time, but found that other people were implementing the features that they had in incompatible ways and merging was costing them a lot of developer time. In contrast, pushing stuff upstream that isn't their core competitive advantage (which, in most cases, is not even the software, it's the integration of the software with hardware and the surrounding ecosystem) costs them almost nothing. No Machiavellian approach is required. Companies are increasingly coming around to the idea that if they license software under a proprietary license, they're setting themselves up for a large long-term cost. If they pay someone to improve software with a more permissive license, then they are not locked in. They choose open source because it reduces their risk and potential long-term costs. They avoid GPLv3 because their lawyers tell them that it exposes them to greater risk. If you really want a Machiavellian approach, how about noticing that Apple has contributed a huge amount of code to Objective-C support in Clang (including the static analyser), which directly benefits GNUstep. Wouldn't it be great if we could make more companies invest in things that benefitted open source versions of their proprietary products? > They can afford it why not. If there is no company willing to use gplv3 I'll > make one. Gplv3 software is a strategic resource in my opinion. > > Most companies find me unemployable so that's not a problem. Good luck with that. And then try selling your code in a marketplace that has decided that more permissive is better and views GPL'd code in the same light that the FSF views closed proprietary code. I'd agree that the GPLv3 is a strategic resource. It has been great for the FreeBSD project and for LLVM. Both projects have had a massive increase in both volunteer contributors and commercial contributions as a direct result of it. The fundamental difference between the BSDL and GPL philosophies is that the BSDL aims to make writing open source software easier, and accepts that the side effect of this is that writing proprietary software also becomes easier, whereas the GPL aims to make writing proprietary software harder and accepts that the side effect is that writing Free Software becomes harder. Personally, I believe that the best way to move beyond a world where proprietary software is the norm (as we've now done in a lot of markets) is to make writing Free Software as easy as possible, because single-vendor off-the-shelf software just can't compete in a world where people are cooperating to build exactly what they need. Any impediment to this cooperation harms the ecosystem and promotes proprietary software. David -- Sent from my IBM 1620 _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
