On 02/10/2011 05:07 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > 2. Company mode (free) - where the project is mainly run by a company > and the said company does not have any proprietary products based on the > project in question. Usually these companies are able to attract large > number of developers because the developers know that the open source > version they are working on is the same version that the company is > working on. Companies almost invariably choose the GPL as suits are > scared that some one may 'steal' their code. Any way a prime example of > this type is Red hat.
I have yet to see any evidence that organizations prefer GPL for control or they prefer GPL at all and in any case, Red Hat as a example of that is incorrect. Take Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora and you will find that majority of packages have code that is developed outside of Red Hat and Red Hat serves as a integration point. It is clear according to several surveys that majority of FOSS developers who are hobbyists prefer GPL and not merely organizations and the motivations are described for those who bothered to look as well . Also when Red Hat does development of a new project, the license of the project is chosen on a case by case basis. I can give you examples of various licenses that Red Hat has chosen for new projects. a) Libvirt, LGPL b) FreeIPA , GPLv3, c) Deltacloud, Apache, D) Red Hat directory server, GPLv2 + exceptions, E) LibXML2, MIT. I am sure there are others. > There is the curious case of PHP where a company > has 'downgraded' it's license from GPL to a BSD style license. Wonder > why ;-) Sort of knocks the apparent logic of the wine license change > into a hat. Not really. A license change is not a downgrade or a upgrade. That concept has no legal meaning. Also if anything it knocks down the idea the organizations prefer GPL. The motivations will have to be evaluated based on the project in question Rahul _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
