To my mind, it’s analogous to the situation with command and free-market economies: a command economy says “you must allocate resources in THIS way, because that is what’s best”, whereas a free-market economy relies on the self-interest and fundamental rationality of its participants to develop that same ‘best’ allocation of resources. GPL requires contribution; it doesn’t trust its developers to do so out of self-interest. Fundamentally, that’s destructive; immediate contribution isn’t always best, short-term monopolies *are* beneficial for innovation, and being required to contribute back code that they might be ashamed of scares off developers. (At least, I know it scares me off.)

What do you think?

not sure i'd go as far to say that it's better psychologically, however, because there are ample examples of more permissively licensed code with lots of contributions behind (e.g. Apache). plus most folks in the software world are *used* to others profiting from their work – it's the nature of the business. open source changes that paradigm, of course, but how much?

good points nonetheless, however.

Nigel: i think you highlight two important components to the GPL's popularity; it's ability to compel community behavior, and the guarantee of openness. again, i don't think the GPL is the only means to such ends, but definitely an important one.

Jaime: exactly. of the GPL's many aims, i'd argue that one is no longer as relevant as it was. but still important? absolutely.

Fraxas: you're right, i didn't answer that, but to address the point, no, i don't buy that. why not? well, i could point to Linux as an example that the GPL in no way, shape or form prohibits contributions and usage – though it undoubtedly makes them more complicated.

but really i think it's for the same reasons i don't worry to much about license proliferation: the ability to route around it. now i don't mean that in the sense that you route around the license already applied, but rather that if the GPL proves to be a deterrent to certain forms of participation, there are other options readily available. to me its about choice, and as long as the ability not to credibly choose the GPL exists, i can't see the GPL being a drag of any kind (not to mention that there's little evidence of that in the state of the community today). philosophically, i understand the point, but in my experience developers and enterprises alike don't spend the time delving into the philosophy of the GPL's significance to the extent that some of us in the community do; they just want to know what they can and can't do, and move on. the GPL's one way, BSD's another, MPL/CDDL's yet another, and so on. choose what works best for your needs, understanding the implications of the licensing choices available to you.

GPL is however better psychologically, because we as human beings feel unhappy if we think somehow other people are profitting from our hard work.

Also GPL is a very good license from a market domination point of view. GPL is a ‘black hole’ license that locks you in to using it. Oddly it’s similar to Windows APIs and Office doc formats, in that the more people who use them, the more advantage there is to using them.

If I start a project and want to have the most choice in components I can reuse, I have to go with GPL, since BSD is compatible with GPL, but not the other way around.

Before I get beat up on, in saying 'free'. I refer instead to the freedom of choice, freedom of not being locked in, freedom of integrating the pieces that make sense for the solution we seek.

To assume 'free' as in cost focuses on the public facade of open source and all the hype and misses what open is all about.

Words such as community didn't happen by mistake. The GPL compels us to work together, build upon the original work, to put our best foot forward without the naive gain of simple license revenue as the end result. Even the elements of support as Stephen well knows in our case has been put to the test of the open community and the impact of a GPL with innovative new idea's that we don't own, but we give back to the community because they have value, not as a technology, but as a solution.

In the end of it all isn't that what technology is supposed to be about, the solution to business problems when applied properly. I see GPL as tool to enable that.

As a final point, consider the relation of the GPL and its impact to programming, to that of the ever evolving space we call object oriented development/programming (OOP). Wasn't the whole point supposed to be about re-use, building better code, building upon the pieces that were built before? Typically this model resides within an organization. When externalized the GPL promotes and defends the same philosophy that OOP was supposed to deliver when it was inside the organization, but as a global community we share for mutual benefit, not personal gain.

Thanks for listening. . .