On May 14, 8:57 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek- central.gen.new_zealand> wrote: > In message <84a26d03-03b3-47d9- > > a1f9-107470b87...@k2g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>, Patrick Maupin wrote: > > I also firmly believe, as I have stated before, that the GPL is a much > > more commercial license. If you want to make money off something, > > then, no doubt, GPL keeps your competitors from being able to take > > what you wrote and redistribute it as closed source. But, frankly I > > view that as more of a business issue than a moral issue. > > Nevertheless, it’s probably a big factor in why the GPL has become the > single most popular open-source licence.
Possibly. I think a bigger factor is that the GPL is *designed* to win license competitions. If you view the license as part of the DNA of a piece of software, then whenever two packages "breed" (are combined) the resultant package will always have the GPL if either of the source packages did. In attempting to draw a biological parallel, many have equated the GPL to a virus, but this analogy fails miserably. The "selfish gene" analogy has much to recommend it, however: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene#.22Selfish.22_genes It's an interesting exercise to extend the analogy to show how the GPL gene mutated in a way to allow it to mate with even *more* licenses (and always come out on top). So now there are two incompatible selfish gene FOSS licenses in the ecosystem. The license genes always propagate whenever the host software mates, but in order to have that genetic advantage, they avoid allowing their host software to mate whenever they couldn't be the dominant license gene of the resultant package. One side effect of this is that the two major GPL variants are unable to mate with each other. Regards, Pat -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
