[Matt Asay Tells The Truth] Stallman: GPL doesn't guarantee software freedom

[Alexander Terekhov]

LOL!

Summary:

"For those who have been reading/hearing Stallman for the past 10-plus
years as I have, this admission is shocking in the extreme. The GPL,
which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of software freedom, may
deliver the opposite. Because of its control-freak urges, it can stymie
competition, which is presumably why Stallman is now calling on the
European Commission to grant what his license couldn't: freedom."

LMAO!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10379280-16.html

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October 20, 2009 4:06 PM PDT 

Stallman: GPL doesn't guarantee software freedom

by Matt Asay 
 
The freedom to fork is the essential right of open-source software.
Until Oracle's attempted acquisition of Sun/MySQL, however, few realized
just how important it would be to retain the right to fork one's own
code.

After all, just because you have the letter-of-the-law right to fork
doesn't mean you have a meaningful ability to do so. So long as you're
not the primary copyright holder, you're always going to be second
place, with second-place commercial opportunities in the software.

MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius hints at this in his letter to the
European Commission, citing conflicts of interest between Oracle and
MySQL development interests. Such conflicts wouldn't be of such
importance were it not for the lack of external commercial appeal that
stems from MySQL's use of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Even Richard Stallman, co-author of the GPL and founder of the
free-software movement, and not someone that spends much time worrying
about monetization of open-source software, gets this.

As noted in a letter co-drafted with Open Rights Group and Knowledge
Ecology International, Stallman notes that Oracle's proposed acquisition
of MySQL could hurt its development because the GPL reduces incentives
to commercialize the code:

The acquisition of MySQL by Oracle will be a major setback to the
development of a FLOSS database platform, potentially alienating and
dispersing MySQL's core community of developers. It could take several
years before another database platform could rival the progress and
opportunities now available to MySQL, because it will take time before
any of them attract and cultivate a large enough team of developers and
achieve a similar customer base.

Given that forking of the MySQL code base will be particularly dependent
on FLOSS community contributions - more so than on in-company
development - THE LACK OF A MORE FLEXIBLE LICENSE FOR MYSQL WILL PRESENT
CONSIDERABLE BARRIERS TO A NEW FORKED DEVELOPMENT PATH FOR MYSQL.
[Emphasis added.]

For those who have been reading/hearing Stallman for the past 10-plus
years as I have, this admission is shocking in the extreme. The GPL,
which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of software freedom, may
deliver the opposite. Because of its control-freak urges, it can stymie
competition, which is presumably why Stallman is now calling on the
European Commission to grant what his license couldn't: freedom.

Now consider if MySQL were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. MySQL
2 could arise, take the code, hire all of the developers, and
development of the open-source database would not miss a beat.

Could MySQL 2 achieve the same with the GPL? No, it could not, because
the copyright holder, Oracle, would always have a superior commercial
opportunity, because it has more rights than downstream users, as the
GPL leaves the copyright holder with a greater range of business model
options, and not simply support/services. 

Apache leaves everyone--developers, users, vendors, etc.--on equal
footing. The GPL does not. With the GPL, the copyright holder retains
effective control.

That's one reason it has been so popular with commercial open-source
companies, but the Oracle/MySQL situation may prompt more companies to
consider using an Apache license so as to preserve maximum freedom in
case of takeover, hostile or otherwise.

Disclosure: My company uses the GPL but has been actively considering
areas to use Apache licensing.
 Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and
legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging
open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice
president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops
open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET
Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow
Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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regards,
alexander.

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm 
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can 
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards 
too, whereas GNU cannot.)