Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Tue Jul 1 03:33:31 UTC 2008


On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Matthew Saltzman <mjs at clemson.edu> wrote:

> Good for them.  (No sarcasm intended.)  But an anecdote is not a proof.


I'm countering the implied FUD that the GPL scares away commercial
developers by pointing out how copyleft licenses can in fact attract
commercial development to the open source model who would otherwise avoid
it, as copyleft licenses can protect their bottom line in a way that
so-called "permissive" licenses can not. And I even gave a concrete example,
lets call it a case study. Which is more than what you're giving.

The GPL is not the only license that protects code released under it
> from incorporation into proprietary products.  But some clauses in the
> GPL prevent interoperability with other software that (for whatever
> reason) was released under different licenses that even the FSF
> acknowledges are in the spirit of freedom and open source.  That's too
> bad for free and open-source software.


This is what you call a 'bug'. Yes, bugs are unfortunate, but bugs can be
fixed. Lets look at another case study: It just so happens that the Second
Life client has run in to this. It uses the APR library, which is under the
Apache License 2.0, which on a technicality is incompatable with the GPLv2.
Linden Lab solved this by "patching" the GPL by giving a FLOSS exception.
Problem solved.

And it just so happens the FSF released a new version of the GPL, version 3
which fixes the Apache License incompatability. Unfortunately Linden Lab
chose GPLv2 Only, me and others have asked them to update to GPLv3, or at
least switch to GPLv2+, but it has been blown off as being rather low
priority for them...
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