That Notorious Suit (Slightly OT)

[Zak Greant]

On Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003, at 20:29 Africa/Accra, Daniel Carrera wrote:
...
>> 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.

While it may not have been created by a high-priced team of lawyers, it 
does have the endorsement of Eben Moglen.

Eben Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law 
School. He clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the SDNY and Justice 
Thurgood Marshall (http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/hill/marshall.htm).

These are solid credentials (with some nice ooohaaah factor due to 
Thurgood Marshall). Should be enough to make the PHBs more comfy.

>>> 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.

That generalization may be overly broad. PHP and Apache use (original) 
BSD style licenses - last I checked Apache had about 2/3 of the web 
server market share. PHP was installed on slightly over 1/2 of these 
servers.  Perl's Artistic License is BSD-like - it is installed on ~ 
1/5th of Apache servers. (See 
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/index.html)

-- 
Cheers!
Zak Greant
MySQL AB Community Advocate
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