On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Dan Armbrust wrote: > There is a reason corporate America won't touch GPL when it comes to > writing other software. Heck, even other major opensource organizations > like Apache and Eclipse won't touch GPL. > > The Apache license gives you (the user) much more freedom than anything > GPL related, end of story. The tradeoff, of course, is less control > over the software by the developer. But hey, its the developers choice. > I just hope that at some point, his views will restrict him into > obscurity, and more developers will switch to a license that does > provide more freedom to the users. Why be vague, Dan? The important difference is that some of the GPL-compatible open source licenses allow the code to be used in proprietary closed-source programs, but the GPL does not allow that. Is that kind of freedom going to promote free software? GPL code is self-perpetuating, and that is why, I think, you will not see Stallman's views "restrict him into obscurity." Developers will choose BSD-style licenses if they want to encourage use of their code in proprietary programs. A recent example of this is Google Chrome. Google wants their ideas to be used in all browsers because then those browsers will work better with Google's online apps. The license is meant to promote the online apps, not Google Chrome itself. So for them it is a sensible idea. If you want to encourage people to contribute to your project, and you want your project to survive and prosper, then GPL is a better choice because it doesn't encourage people to make proprietary programs to compete with yours, and it forces people who use your code to share their enhancements with you. So GPL is a much better choice for many projects and that is why it is so widely used. Mike