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by amelius 3939 days ago
In spite of its good intentions, a restrictive license such as the GPL is always a weakness and a flaw. I would like to pose the conjecture that any library with a GPL license will eventually be replaced by a library with a more liberal license; the reason is simply because it has one feature extra, which is the more liberal license.
1 comments
vog 3939 days ago
> any library with a GPL license will eventually be replaced with a library with a more liberal license

That's probably true, but it is not an argument against using the GPL.

If your GPL library is original and useful, the cost of reimplementing it will probably higher than the cost of making some depending piece of software Open Source.

So during the time until somebody else wrote that ISC/MIT/BSD version (which may be decades, think of GCC versus clang!), lots of other software may have been made Free Software that would otherwise have been proprietary.

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brlcad 3939 days ago
I love open source and appreciate free software tenants, but think this is absolutely an argument against using the GPL for library-style codes.

Your point is an ancillary benefit. Most authors don't publish libraries to encourage the greater FSF-ecosystem or free software agenda -- they publish to make it available to others and see it get put to use. Picking a license that limits prevalence of use is contrary to that objective, plain and simple.

It also does not necessarily follow that proprietary would have been the alternative to free software. Published as ISC/MIT/BSD, lots of additional open source software would have been able to make use of the library, advanced more quickly, more easily permitted additional open source and free software derivatives, etc.

More power to authors that choose to use GPL on a library code, as they are certainly entitled to do so, but it is a substantially limiting factor in the near and long term. We do not have to agree on these points. ;)

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jeffreyrogers 3939 days ago
gcc vs. clang is probably a special case. Code compiled with gcc doesn't become GPL, which is part of why it is so popular.
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