Pros and cons of the GNU General Public License

Elze

October 2, 2005

Synopsis from Linucon program book: "The most popular open source license, the GPL, inspires controversy to this day. Eric Raymond recently expressed some ambivalence about it, so he and his lawyer wife Cathy are moderating this panel, with Jay Maynard [ http://www.tronguy.net/ ] speaking out against the GPL and Rob Landley defending it."

One of Rob Landley's pro GPL arguments is that it can prevent a project from forking. Jay Maynard, who claims credit for coining the term General Public Virus, objects to GPL mainly because of its ideological agenda. Rob says GPL keeps companies from taking open source code, incorporating it into their products and making money off of someone else's work without giving back to the community. Jay counters that even if companies did that, the good consequences of this action would outweigh the bad.

Eric Raymond then inserts himself physically and ideologically between these two "nutcase friends" of his. His position is that GPL is slowing down the adoption of open source, because it is often incorrectly perceived that a company that uses open source software would be obligated to blow open their entire intellectual property. Furthermore, he says, GPL is based on the assumption that defecting from the open source community is attractive, whereas in reality it is its own punishment. Both sides use Linksys as an example to support their arguments. :-) They briefly debate whether the reason BSD did not become as popular as Linux was due to its license, or, as Eric Raymond argues, because they got their social machinery wrong.

My full article about this panel can be found on my website: http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20060215125250256.

Left to right: Cathy Raymond, Eric Raymond, Rob Landley, Jay Maynard in the discussion panel "Pros and cons of the GNU General Public License".