For example, imagine that Linus chose BSD license for Linux, formed the community around it, but then after a while a big company decides to make its own closed Linux and calls in Pinux. Next say 5 years they constantly improve Pinux while merging from geek-powered community of Linux, so in 5 years they have all features of Linux plus a lot of their closed-source improvements. Would Linux have gained such success always being an outsider? I guess not.

A BSD/MIT license guarantees more freedom to the person receiving or distributing specific software.

Both are useful.

This would never have happened with a BSD style licencse.

AFAIK, MIT doesn’t require the license statement to be perpetuated through derivative works, but it seems to just suggest/request it. And this is good enough for me. I hope I get some credit for the work I do, but more than that, I hope my work contributes to the overall good.

Bottom line, the reason I open-source code is because I *trust* the open-source community as a whole.

Does Apple contribute to BSD as much as Intel, Nokia and Google contributes to Linux?

I really don’t think so.. I think they contribute because the license requires them to contribute, not because they are “nice guys”.

For instance there are more and more hardware devices using embedded Linux being sold. Since Linux is licensed under the GPL the source code needs to be made available as well. This does not seem to have slowed down adaption of embedded Linux in the hardware world.

I guess it really depends on the context, but I would be very interested in any research results on the adaption and usage of software licenses in relation to the Tragedy of The Commons principle.

Personally I prefer to use copyleft licenses. It seems both the best and worst way to teach people the quid pro quo mentality some of us seem to take for granted.

Instead, we have to redevelop the library from scratch. I can understand applications and ‘top-level’ software being GPL licensed as these are a ‘finished product’, but for libraries I would prefer them all to be permissively licensed, so we get one well-developed, solid library and not half a dozen incomplete implementations – as is all too often the case in the PHP world (and what I’ve seen of Python GPL libraries too).

Free software can be commercial software. For another example, take a look at Red Hat. They make many millions of dollars per year in global profits on GPL’ed software, and they are clearly a commercial entity.

For another point of view, consider the case of say Pidgin, the popular IM client. Pidgin is licensed under the GPL, and has many proprietary competitors. If Pidgin were to be BSD/MIT/APL/etc licensed, you can guarantee some company would take the code, throw some money and shininess at it, and sell the result. They would make millions… and the Pidgin project would die. Users are left with unmaintained, buggy software (as proprietary software tends to be), and the original developers would feel “ripped off” as their code is now in use by a product they don’t even have the source code, and to add insult to injury, they would have to pay for it.

I’m a software engineer by profession, and make money doing it. And I’m certainly not concerned that Free software will ruin my career – in fact, I’m positive it will improve it.

Regular GPL does the same thing for non-network applications.

If your goal is to protect the rights of the users to be able to live in freedom, you want the GPL.

Personally, I lean towards a variant of the philosophy August mentioned: if the stewards of a project are doing a good job of serving their community, their community will support them back. That is why MIT/BSD licensed projects like jQuery and Rails succeed, and why other MIT/BSD projects do not. But that is equally true of GPL and LGPL projects: Linux is not the sole example, by a long shot (mysql, git, gcc, webkit, and 1000s more).

Further, I’ve worked at a number of very large corporations (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) and of those companies, only Microsoft had any issue with using GPL’d software internally (and their stance may have softened in the many years since I worked there, I have no idea). Company lawyers do tend to shy away from including any GPL’d code in products that get distributed to end users because of copyleft, but in my experience this was not a big inhibitor. To name just one example, Adobe’s acrobat.com runs primarily on Linux servers using mysql and many other pieces of LGPL software. Of course, the fact that these corporations are using these GPL packages more or less “as-is” means that they are less likely to be contributing patches back to those GPL projects as you discuss in your article. But its not black or white.