MSFT and GNU questions

[Karsten M. Self]

on Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 08:04:39PM +0000, David Johnson (david at usermode.org) wrote:
> On Thursday June 07 2001 10:05 pm, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> 
> > Among the questions raised was the perennial "where do you turn for
> > advice on the GPL".
> 
> One bad thing that happened as a result of this skirmish was that the
> public now identifies Open Source with the GPL. The GPL is not the
> only OSS license, yet every arrow Mundie shot was aimed at the GPL,
> and every rebuttal from our side focused on copyleft. This despite the
> fact that the three biggest OSS projects are not released under the
> GPL.

I think the attack and focus are indicative of several things.  Among
them, Microsoft is most afraid of the GPL -- they can't coopt it.  BSD
can (and has) been coopted by Microsoft -- but then, that's the design
intent of the BSD/MIT license.  I'm not arguing that this is good or
bad, just stating that it *is*, and the feature's been utilized by our
northern friends.

And, while GPL isn't the *only* free software license, some 90% of free
software projects (based on independent counts by me of SourceForge
aprojects and Debian packages) use the GPL and/or LGPL licenses.  That's
a very large majority.  A significant remainder are BSD/MIT or similar,
many of these being fully GPL compatible.  MozPL and variants round out
much of the remainder, on-off licenses and corporate licenses are
relatively rare.  While a useage-weighted survey might suggest a greater
significance of other licenses (BSD:  apache, bind; MIT:  X11; MozPL:
Mozilla, Galeon, Skipstone...), there's no question that the GPL is
significant both by the volume of usage and its own peculiar nature.

That said...

> This forum should not be merely an advice center for the GPL. There is
> a broad enough range of OSS licenses that anyone who has a problem
> with the strong copyleft can find something else that works for them.

Exclusive discussion of the GPL isn't what I'm suggesting, and this
should have been more than clear in my post, apologies if it wasn't.
FSB and license-discuss are existing forums for information in general
on free software business and licensing issues.  While Microsoft has
chosen to raise the spectre of GPL, it would be entirely appropriate to
discuss other licenses, and I often suggest a strategic approach in
determining license suitability myself.  

The point is that Microsoft claims there's nowhere to turn.  This is
simply false, though the available resources could be better publicized.

> A concrete example: Microsoft doesn't like the GPL so they yell and
> holler and make absurd press releases. As if they had no other choice.
> Apple doesn't like the GPL either, but they quietly use software from
> a different source and don't make any stinks.

Apple's made (and some argue, continues to make) mistakes in its
licensing evolution.  While Apple has participated in discussions at
license-discuss and elsewhere, other companies have not.  All could
benefit.  This is what I'm hoping to help encourage.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>    http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?       There is no K5 cabal
  http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/         http://www.kuro5hin.org
   Disclaimer:          http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
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