Yesterday, I wrote about the clarification regarding WordPress Themes and the GPL (v2). Daniel Jalkut, who I featured as a personal WordPress Hero earlier this year, wrote one of the most interesting responses to “[WordPress] Themes are GPL, too“. Written on Thursday and temporarily taken offline by the fireball, Daniel’s “Getting Pretty Lonely” article laments that WordPress is GPL, and that any open source software that uses a GPL license discourages developer community participation.
At first this article left me very upset, maybe because I found it quite persuasive, but then I reflected that for anyone developing and selling proprietary software, Daniel’s is the only position to believe in and promote.
It’s a fair point that my involvement in the business of selling proprietary software must color my opinions.
There have been a lot of interesting responses to my post, and the synthesis of what I think is true across the board in defense of the GPL license for these projects is that they are giving something up (attractiveness to a larger crowd of developers) in exchange for something else that they value more (participation in a political/moral movement that promotes free software as a universal right).
I personally don’t really care for the GPL, in favor of things like the BSD/MIT licenses.
Things like the GPL’s over-assertiveness of rights, Mozilla’s “taking their ball and going home” (Re: IceWeasel), etc only serve to piss people off and put them off open-source software.
By blanketly allowing all rights – including that of profiting from someone else’s work – you not only end up with a license that’s much shorter, but you get a bunch of people contributing stuff that otherwise wouldn’t have been. For examples, see the BSD network stack (it’s use in Sony consoles hasn’t harmed it in any way), Darwin, and lots of the neat new stuff Sun’s been doing.
You make it sound like the only people who would want to participate in proprietary software are those who already participate in proprietary software. This is true in many cases, but you’ll not find many proprietary software companies developing and contributing to the community. That is the point of the message. Those companies don’t realize the benefits, not are they going to any time soon. Look at Microsoft, whom for many years looked down on open source and wasn’t until recently that they’ve actually experimented with it.
I’ll give an example. I was working on a library with another developer. There was a third developer who liked what we were doing and the path the project was taking, but it was GPL and therefore was incompatible with his license. He wasn’t willing to use the library, because he was unwilling to change the license for his project. By making the library New BSD, we could get his support in the future and others who would like to use the library, contribute back (maybe), and get word out there.
GPL can work outside of commercial interests. WordPress, Linux, plus many other projects have shown that to be the case.
Think of it this way. The Zend Framework changed its license for the same reason listed above and is now dual licensed. The Mozilla project is tri-licensed for the same reason.
You just aren’t going to get a lot of support from commercial interests who are trying to protect their commercial projects. Why should a company put forth a developer who they are paying full time to work on the project or part-time to work on the project when that time can also be used by a competitor?
Wow, his post sure came from a strange place. I love the GPL because it makes the rules really clear – if you’re playing in this playground you’ve got to share your toys with everyone. It’s as clear as a proprietary license.
I’ve spent about half of my career writing libre software and about half writing proprietary software. From a personal perspective there are social aspects of each that I enjoy and aspects of each that I don’t but it’s clear to me what the expectations are.
I don’t think the choice of license actually makes much of a difference for libre software. Companies who want to participate will participate. They’ll pay people to work on GPL software and they’ll submit code back to BSD or Apache licensed projects. It’s only people who want to take community developed code and not contribute back that have an issue with license choice and they don’t tend to be successful anyway.
It’s always a matter of the right tool for the right job – use GPL for your software where you want to foster community involvement and still keep control. Use BSD-style licenses when you want to basically throw something at the market…. Every license has its market – just don’t choose GPL because it’s the most used OSS License.