From: Nathan Kelley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,From: Nathan Kelley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,From: Daniel Carrera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
I had never heard of this stumbling block (not to say that it wasn't there). But I've never heard of someone not wanting to use a GPL product because they weren't sure if the license would stand in court.
It's a point commonly brought up by analysts when handing out advice through c|net, BusinessWeek, InfoWorld, and friends.
Are those analysts all called "Rob Enderle" by any chance?
Nope. Whenever I see that name attached to an article I skip it.
There are others making these claims, and what's odd is they seem to believe them. The odd part is where you don't see these claims, or even inquisition, on proprietary licenses hidden in the shrinkwrap. They assume that proprietary licenses hidden in the shrinkwrap were crafted by people who know what they're doing and don't need to be challenged, and that open-source licenses are by definition not. As Zak pointed out, this is not a logical or cohesive argument.
So, we end up with analysts not asking the tough questions, online publications such as those above giving said analysts airtime, and the wrong idea gets conveyed; the association between the GnU General Public License and Fear, Uncertainly and Doubt. This is why you keep seeing very odd opinions and ideas of what the GPL represents, versus what it actually does.
But since declaring a license invalid out-of-hand will cause an analyst to be subject to extreme ridicule on the grounds they're straying from their field of expertise, they also claim that, were the GPL to be tested in court found meritorious, that would be proof absolute that you could rely on it not to land you, your colleagues and your customers in a nasty spot.
It all sounds very silly, doesn't it? But I've read it enough times to know how the story goes. And each time I see it, I remain surprised at how short-sighted some of these people can be. I believe it will reduce further as Linux-distributions and other technologies become more mainstream, and thus a fact of life.
They don't put stock into the GPL apparently because a high-priced team of lawyers didn't create it. That is, of course, a silly point to make, but they make it anyway. And people listen, including The People Who Matter™ at any given workplace.
Sigh... Typical PHB.
Unfortunately, yes. I was surprised though, at my current workplace, to find a distinct lack of PHB's in IT areas. It only means that silly decisions and sillier convictions are less per month than the average, though :-(
If Linux were BSD there would be no suit, simply because there would be no competition.
I agree wholeheartedly with this point. And there wouldn't be thousands of volunteers if they thought they were providing free labor for others, particularly development houses that then released products only for the Windows platform. Fortunately, we're not in that dimension.
I hadn't thought of that. That might be part of the reason why the GPL-based projects are so much larger than the BSD-based projects.
Zak made good points here about Apache, Perl and PHP. I'll just add that the reasons for not choosing to go with the GPL are as much ideological - from what I've seen, having been close to some projects - as they are with choosing the GPL for the reasons the FSF intends... despite what RMS says about open-source.
Cheers, Nathan. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
