I consciously stayed away from this GPL/BSD thread having participated in one
too many times, but just for the sake of those reading this thread and are on
the fence (as opposed to KG, who is a known BSD ..erm ...weenie if you may :)
),
I'd like to point out the essential difference. It basically boils down to this
argument always ...
On 01/05/2011 01:21 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 22:30 +0530, Shamit Verma wrote:
>> >
>> > please do - very curious to know why people who develop code in
>> closets
>> > choose the GPL for their so-called 'community versions'.
>> >
>> >
>> So that someone can not take community version of their code and
>> create
>> another commercial clone. If somebody does that, that clone would have
>> to
>> open the source under GPL.
>
> so the purpose of GPL is to prevent people from making proprietary
> clones? I totally fail to understand the rationale behind this. If I
> have a plot of land, and someone encroaches on it - then I no longer
> have the land, unless I evict him. But software? Even if someone takes a
> copy and makes it closed - I still have my copy. So what do I lose?
You lose the improvements that the other person makes.
In an ideal world the other person would contribute the improvements back
without having to be legally obligated to do so (as in the case of GPL),
however
in the BSD world this does not happen as often as it should (ask the BSD folk
what they gained from Apple and M$ copying their code and improving on it).
This
is not to say that the other people copying/forking /never/ submit back -- it
does happen -- with GPL tho' making it a legal obligation ensures that it
always
happens.
> Software is not a commodity that can be bought and sold. Whether I give
> my software to someone, or sell it - I still have it on my repo, on my
> hard disk, on forks and on my backup. Why should I worry about it?
...because unlike a commodity, software also grows and improves with more
people
contributing back.
I love the way Linus once put it:
"Let me put this in source management terms, since I've also been working
on a source control management project for the last few years: the BSD license
encourages 'branching', but the fact is, branching is not really all that
interesting. What's interesting is 'merging': the branching is just a largely
irrelevant prerequisite to be able to merge.
"The GPLv2 encourages *merging*. Again, the right to 'branch' needs to be
there in order for merges to be possible, but the right to branch is actually
much less important than the right to 'merge'."
cheers,
- steve
[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/8382
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