> I hope this isn't turning into a License flame war. > But why do Linux > contributors not deserve the right to retain their > choice of license > as equally as Sun, or any other copyright holder, > does? > > The anti-GPL kneejerk just witnessed on this list is > astonishing. The > BSD license, for instance, is fundamentally > undesirable to many GPL > licensors (myself included).
Nothing wrong with GPL as an abstract ideology. But when ideology trumps practicality (which it does when code can't be as widely reused as possible), I have a problem with that. As far as I'm concerned, GPL is to open licenses as political correctness is to free speech. Of course, anyone who writes something is free to use any license they please. And anyone else is free to choose an incompatible license, either for reasons that have nothing specifically to do with being incompatible, or because they just don't want the sucking sound of their goodies being adopted and very little being returned (which strikes me as a major element of the relationship between Linux and *BSD; although to be sure, there is some two-way cooperation). I have zero problem with Linux using GPLv2 (and as some have said, perhaps being stuck with it at this point). I'm not sure I'd want their code anyway, and even if I did, I darn sure wouldn't want the "we don't need no steekin' DDI 'cause we're source based" philosophy that comes with it, because to my mind that ends up justifying a lot of poor design and engineering discipline in the name of not being limited by backwards compatibility. So, if having chosen a license based on the ideology of being a lever to free other software (but on their terms!) for the sake of being compatible with them, the Linux folks now have to re-invent equivalents of ZFS and Dtrace, it serves them right, IMO. And as someone else also mentioned, competition is good anyway. Not as if a lot of ideas don't cross-pollinate. But if every free OS used compatible licenses, I think 20 years later, the result would resemble the result of inbreeding...not pretty, and a shallower meme pool overall. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
