Fine, but don’t hide behind the word “freedom”. Freedom can never be absolute, the freedom of one person ends where that of the other begins. GPL-hostile environments are so because part of their core business model is to limit the freedom of others through the use of copyright and patent laws, not in a merely defensive but aggressive manner. These environments are a threat freedom.

Yes, there are plenty of situations where the benefits of a non viral license like BSD far outweigh the negatives, especially if broad adoption is desirable. God forbid all open source software was GPL-licensed. But it has nothing at all to do with freedom.

Not giving is shit is not the same as standing for freedom. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. What most BSD supporters are basically saying is: “we love freedom, but we’re not prepared to fight for it”. And I get it. It’s a nasty fight, GPL is a nasty weapon, and the FSF is a bunch of know-it-all fundamentalists.

But please stop pretending BSD is about freedom. It’s like saying absolute pacifism is about defending your country. It would be in an ideal world, but not in the real one.

The only constraint of the GPL is that it prevents other people from distributing NON-free versions of your code, downstream. That’s it.

You’re free to use the license or not. If there’s GPL’ed code out there that you’d like to use, it’s exactly the same as closed source: you choose if the price makes sense to you. If using the GPL in your derived work is “too expensive” for your project, it’s the same as if the commercial license were out of your price range. …Plus there’s often a closed source license you can purchase as an alternative (MySQL is a well-known example).

Either way, the world has the choice to use your code however they like internally (and keeping secret their code for derivative versions) — it’s only if they want to *distribute* something based on your GPL’ed code that they need to likewise use the GPL for that. It’s their choice, and it’s quite similar to demo or developer versions of WebSphere, Oracle, DB2, etc.. — use this all you want, take your time to learn it, but it’s not free-as-in-beer if you want to make money off it yourself.

Bitching about the GPL — about someone else’s software that’s GPLed, that is — is kind of like complaining that Oracle is too expensive. Well, sure, it may be out of range for your project, and you can complain to them if you like, but they have plenty of actual customers to occupy them. If GPLed software draws no developer community or users, the developer may decide to change the license — that’s all their choice.

Bitching about using the GPL yourself (or not) is just kinda silly — learn what the different license options are, and make an informed choice. No one out there has the right to tell you you’re “wrong” as long as you understand the choice you’re making. I don’t see how *not* using the GPL is any kind of bold statement either (see the massive amount of Apache/MIT/BSD/etc. licensed software, for example).

Even the FSF doesn’t thing everything should be GPLed. See Ogg Vorbis, for example.

Also, I always cringe a bit when people throw around the term “revolutionary” when referring to Stallman. History has repeatedly shown us that one man’s revolutionary is another man’s totalitarian dictator.

[...]I can taste the irony in this, and knowing today’s Internet, it’s probably either going to get me crucified or ignored, but I’ll say it straight:

It’s about freedom.[...]…

That’s why the BSD license exists; that’s why Firefox isn’t GPL; that’s why the Apache open source license exists. Check them out.

Personally, I feel that the whole world is better off with more code that’s usable by everyone — programmers waste less time rewriting the same damned thing over and over, so software is better & less buggy, there’s less waste, etc. etc..

But I’ve also contributed to GPL software, and released some of my own — I’m quite pro-GPL for situations where it makes sense, where the GPL’ed code will have an active contributing developer community, and where it can successfully fill a solid niche that way. Or, if that’s the only way the developer would release this code, for reasons of commercial competition, etc. (it’s still better than closed source; some folks will at least be able to use it as a resource). But if not, if the GPL restrictions mean that code will simply languish basically unused until it’s obsolete, than that’s a lose-lose situation.

So I disagree with you about the GPL being insidious, or some kind of religious thing. It’s only a very small few (though some are quite vocal…) who think *all* software should be (or can reasonably be) completely free. Beyond that, it’s just an issue of deciding what license is right for what you want to do.

BSD – More freedom to the developers
GPL – More freedom to the users

I, as a developer, give more importance to user’s freedom. Then again, it’s just a matter of preferences.

And we’re specifically not using the GPL, because we’re trying to *give away free stuff*. When we were determining how to license our code release, we had a lot of pro-GPL people telling us how important it was that we use a license that prevents exploitation of our code, but they miss the point. We want *our stuff* to be useful for everyone possible – and that includes the massive majority of real programmers in GPL-hostile environments. Otherwise, we wouldn’t really be giving it away, and that’s the point here.

If you still somehow manage to see that inside-out and backwards, I suggest you reread the article before spewing forth the standard pro-GPL speel.