Re: As the GPL fades

[David Kastrup]

Erik Funkenbusch <erik@despam-funkenbusch.com> writes:

> On Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:50:26 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:
>> 
>>> http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2010/01/28/as-the-gpl-fades/
>>>
>>> ------
>>> As the GPL fades
>>>
>>> Jay Lyman, January 28, 2010 @ 3:17 pm ET
>>>  
>>> We’re continuing to see signs that the dominant GPL open source license
>>> may be fading from favor among commercial open source software players.
>> 
>> Freshmeat:
>> 
>> Licenses
>> 
>>       GPL (20985)
>>
[...]
>> [...]
>> 
>> That's not exactly "fading" in my book.
>
> Who's to say that Freshmeat's license count is kept up to date, but
> let's assume it is.  By my count, that's more than 10,000 non-GPL
> licenses.  And since you don't list the counts from, say a year ago,
> we have no way of knowing if the overall ratio of GPL to non-GPL has
> gone down or up.
>
> So your post doesn't really say anything.

It doesn't say anything about the _trend_.  But "fade" is not just about
a trend.  It is about becoming irrelevant.

And at about 70% of the current license breakdown, this is a nonsensical
characterization.

Nobody say that "Internet Explorer" is "fading from favor among computer
users" even though Firefox has made a considerable dent in its usage
ratio.

But "fade"?  That would be stupid.

That would not even be accurate for Microsoft's internet server (what's
it's name?  IIS or so?) which has about half the deployment as Apache.
But being in second place is not the same as "faded".

-- 
David Kastrup