ESR: > I find that one of my most difficult problems is generally soothing > the fear and uncertainty that your rhetoric has created. It's a double whammy. Businesses look at the GPL and try and work out what the effect is on their operations, and find that it has a nasty little restriction that is difficult to tie down. (It's something to do with selling some changes and having to publish. I've never quite groked the restriction, having read it several times, and I've mostly come across other business people that feel the same way.) So, in order to tie down the restriction, more research is done. And this is when the religous nature of the FSF comes out. At this point businesses realise that they are dealing with a bunch of idealogues, who are on some mission from God, and they are never going to be able to rely on the licence to be friendly to them. The "Stallman factor" is enough to turn many companies away. It remains to be seen whether this will change in the light of increasing publicity and success for GPL (no longer a strange beast) or perhaps the waning of the religous flavour that pervades the GPL. iang PS: This is of course not to say that Stallman has anything to do with it, I'm only referring to the impression that companies get. PPS: It's also not to say that this is wrong. It may be that the ultimate successful strategy is to bet everything on a viral religion and take over the world.
