On 04/25/2013 12:53:53 PM, Zvi Gilboa wrote:

Ironically, much of the current thread is about the need to create
alternatives to commonly-used GPL'ed libraries, which in itself reminds
of past (and present) efforts to create open source alternatives to
proprietary libraries and software products.

Unfortunately the FSF poisoned copyleft in 2006. The GPL was a category killer synonymous with copyleft... until GPLv3 came out and there was no longer any such thing as "The GPL".

Today Linux and Samba can't share code even though they implement two ends of the same protocol. QEMU is caught between wanting Linux driver code to implement devices and gdb/binutils code to implement processors and it can't have both. Licensing code "GPLv2 or later" just makes it worse: you can donate code to both but can't accept code from either one.

Programmers are not lawyers, we're not _good_ at how licenses interact. The GPL was a terminal node in a directed graph of license convertibily, where all a programmer had to care was "is this convertible to The GPL or not"? If it is, treat it as GPL, if not avoid it. There was no interaction, there was just The GPL. The FSF destroyed that, leaving a fragmented incompatible pool, and people's attempts to _fix_ it with Affero GPL or GPL-Next or other viral licenses just fragments it further.

Copyleft only worked with a category killer license creating one big pool. With multiple incompatible copyleft licenses, copyleft _prevents_ code sharing because you can't re-use it or combine it in new projects.

In the absence of a universal receiver license, non-lawyer programmers looking for someting simple and understandable are switching to universal donor licenses. BSD/MIT or outright public domain.

This shows the GPL falling from 72% market share in 2009 to 58 in 2013:

  https://lwn.net/Articles/547400/

Eben Moglen, author of GPLv2 and GPLv3 (Stallman is not a lawyer, Moglen is) recently lamented the decline of copyleft but doesn't seem to understand why:

  https://lwn.net/Articles/547379/

As far as I can tell the FSF has alienated all the young programmers. The most popular license on Github is not specifying a license at all, taking the Napster approach of civil disobedience and waiting for the intellectual property system to collapse. Ten years ago the GPL would have appealed to them, but since GPLv3 shattered the ecosystem it does not.

That's why Android's "no GPL in userspace" policy (if you add GPL code to your userspace, you can't use the Android trademark advertising your product) actually makes _sense_.

Zvi

Rob