By guaranteeing you can benefiting from others using your work, and guaranteeing others can benefit from you using their work. The GPL is pragmatic.
Ian McKellar’s comment “PS: forking is good” to which I responded “Forking is a good, but not as good as merging.” He then challenged me for examples of merges.
His comment is a great reminder that WordPress started as a fork of b2/cafelog.
What are the examples of merging? Adam gives “the classic example is egcs - gcc2“.
I can’t think of other examples of projects merging, but there is a huge amount of GPL code constantly being re-used in other projects. That is what I think of when I think of merging.
It also reminded me of recent writing of Linux leader Linus Torvalds:
“[...] But for a project I actually care about, I would never choose the BSD license. The license doesn’t encode my fundamental beliefs of ‘fairness’. I think the BSD license encourages a ‘everybody for himself’ mentality, and doesn’t encourage people to work together, and to merge.”
“[...] the BSD license encourages ‘branching’, but the fact is, branching is not really all that interesting. What’s interesting is ‘merging’: the branching is just a largely irrelevant prerequisite to be able to merge.
“The GPLv2 encourages *merging*. Again, the right to ‘branch’ needs to be there in order for merges to be possible, but the right to branch is actually much less important than the right to ‘merge’.”
August 8th Update: one of my mentors Eugene Kim, partially in respond to this post, writes Open Source Mergers and the Circle of UNIX.
2 Comments
I wish they’d make copyright something sane like 15-20 years.
Then we’d all be able to make such greater strides forward on the shoulders of others.
engtech, what is it now in the USA? 100 years? Is the length of copyright one of the biggest problems? I don’t think that a shorter copyright would fundamentally help against the proprietary world, though at one time I did. It might even work against our current hacks: GPL, Creative Commons.