Borjam is correct though. Most of the maintainers I’ve spoken to over the years picked GPL because it was the one they had heard about. Not because of explicit ideology. If that’s not a faith argument I don’t know what is.
We must run in different circles, because that is completely different to what the people I've talked about this have said. Cultural differences?
The reasons the closed source derivatives exist is because the maintainers of the actual projects usually do a piss poor job of maintaining them.
Bullshit. Closed source derivatives exist if and only if someone believes they can make money off of them. (There is nothing wrong with that, in my opinion; just let's be honest here.)
This has occurred time and time again, with both operating systems (BSDs), and larger projects like the Apache web server. The history of the closed-source Apache derivatives is especially funny: they just couldn't keep up with the open source upstream.
I believe it is also at the core why the BSD variants suffer from a lack of developers: a company like Apple, having their own derivative, can poach the best developers, and have them work on their derivative only. At least when companies hire Linux kernel devs (and they do, often), those devs still keep contributing to the mainline kernel.
[...] BSD for me. Isn’t that really what we want?
Don't change the subject! It is a completely different thing to discuss what licenses one wants to use for their own projects, than to discuss what licenses others should use, and why.
(I really don't mind what license or rules people choose for their projects; I (and those I've talked to) evaluate each one on a case-by-case basis, with the license requirements part of the "cost". Like I
already mentioned, I personally use several different licenses for my own work, depending which set of rules I believe works best for each case. I'm very pragmatic that way. But this is not the topic at hand.)
The funny thing is, it became something even religious.
You ascribe it to religion, because you dislike it for personal reasons. That is intellectually dishonest.
Preposterous. Where did I say that I dislike the GPL license?
That's how your text reads to me, that's all. If you want, I can reword myself:
"You seem to find it distasteful and anti-intellectual when people choose the GPL license, because you ascribe the choice to religion."There is nothing religious about the license choice. Even if people were to simply pick the license they've heard most about, that would be lazy and conformist, perhaps; nothing at all to do with religion. And you know that; yet you use the term as a denigrating label. That is, as far as I understand, the very definition of intellectual dishonesty. Low manipulation using terms loaded with emotional connotations.
I don't play those social games myself. I prefer direct, blunt, honest communication.
However, should all software be GPL licensed? Not at all.
Why are you telling that to
me? I've already stated I use several licenses myself, so
obviously I don't think all software should be GPL licensed.
BSD license is an excellent choice for example for low-level interface libraries, language standard libraries, device drivers, and so on, where the initial adoption is more important than the risk of having incompatible closed-source derivatives.
Being open source at all is not always an option, either. Sometimes selling licenses is the only way to fund the development and support. It is a perfectly valid business model, nothing wrong in it.
If the Linux ecosystem used BSD instead of GPL, it would not be where it is right now. Claiming otherwise is ignoring FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and the other BSD variants, and their project history; wishful thinking not based on real world experiences. That is why I find this kind of discussion so hilarious and annoying at the same time.
It is also completely fine to dislike the Linux ecosystem, for whatever reason. But to claim that it would have worked out better if they had chosen a different license, or something along those lines, is just unfounded daydreaming out loud. Hard statistics already show that choosing GPL over BSD for the base license for an OS has lead to a larger development community, and better results (as in no BSDs in top-500 supercomputers, for example).
I think no software should be GPL licensed as it removes practical freedoms. Call me religious if you want everyone
No, but idealistic, maybe. You
think everything would be better if licensed under BSD or similar license, but you have no basis for that; only hope. (If you said it was a truth revealed to you in a vision or something like that, then I'd call you a religious nutter.)
Would we have GCC and the other GNU tools without the GPL? It is not clear at all. It is silly to assume that you could change the license at the base of a community, with nothing else changing. Humans don't work like that.
The concept of
fairness seems to be quite built-in to hominids, apes, and monkeys:
I suspect (but have not gathered any real facts behind that suspicion) that a lot of developers who prefer GPL over BSD do so because they perceive GPL as being
fairer, in the sharing sense (i.e., that GPL enforces symmetric sharing, whereas BSD does not). If true, it could explain why GPL-based open source communities seem to attract more senior developers than BSD-based ones do. (The commercial closed-source software world works under completely different rules, of course.)
(Popularity being something completely different again. I, for example, am not at all interested in making Linux more popular. All I want is better tools, and specifically tools that I can mold to my own workflow, and don't demand I conform to the tools. If it means Linux will never be popular on the desktop, fine by me: I don't care if other people draw with fingerpaints and eat glue, as long as I don't have to.)