That Notorious Suit (Slightly OT)

[Daniel Carrera]

> >>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.
> 
> That generalization may be overly broad.

All generalizaions are overly broad.  =)

Yes, it's a genralization.  All that I mean is that the larger projects 
have a distinct tendenc towards being GPL'd.  This is certainly true 
over-all.  Of the largest projects:

   * Linux
   * KDE
   * GNOME
   * GNU (whooahhh!, that's a large project for you)
   * OpenOffice.org

Only the last is not GPL.  And notice that has a lot to do with the fact 
that it used to be propietary.

Even then, OOo is certainly not BSD.  Far from it.  It is a dual 
SISSL/LGPL project.  The LGPL provides similar protection as the GPL.  The 
SISSL is an interesting license.  I certainly like it better than the BSD.  
Essentially what it says is that you're allowed to make propietary 
versions, but you must retain compatibility throughout APIs and file 
formats.  So this negates the bulk of the fear over having your work 
highjacked by a large company from Redmond.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera    | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. | 
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".
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