| > The GPL has no power that owners of proprietary code don't already have. This is technically true, but practically getting a proprietary license for some GPLed programs would be obscenely difficult. How many authors are there of GNU Bash? GCC? Would all of those authors accept money from Apple to allow them to ship a proprietary version of their code in MacOS? Are they all even still alive? And I bet some people would demand obscene amounts of money for tiny patches they made decades ago, just to spite Apple. And they'd probably write scathing blog posts about how apple hates free software just because they were asked. Then what would apple do? Strip out random chunks of code from archaic codebases like bash and hope for the best? Ugh. This would be fine if there was a central owner to whom copyright has been assigned, but opensource programmers aren't in the habit of doing that. So there's no central body with whom Apple can negotiate (and even if there was, would the FSF sell a proprietary license to apple?). Under RMS? No way. Your second point seems incoherent in its own terms. You say: > You can absolutely decide you want to distribute GPL'd software compiled in with proprietary software for which you don't want to release the source. ... But then you say: > GPL is considered "viral" because, for most people, releasing the rest of your source code is preferable to losing in court for regular copyright infringement. So you're saying that the GPL only applies if you don't want to get sued? I mean, sure, but spoilers: Apple doesn't want to get sued for GPL violations. They have deep pockets, and they'd lose, and they'd get really bad press for it which might hurt their ability to hire good programmers in the long run. They don't want the reputation Microsoft had in the 90s. |
There is a view that the GPL is more dangerous than proprietary code. This is untrue: it is strictly less dangerous. If you are somehow not worried about being sued over proprietary code (which, to be clear, seems like a bad approach to me), you shouldn't be more worried about the GPL.
You also have no guarantee of negotiating a license from the owner of proprietary code, and such owner is way more likely to have lawyers than someone who posted a patch to bash 10 years ago and them disappeared from the internet.
(Also, for GNU projects, GNU has a policy of requiring copyright assignment to the FSF, mostly because the FSF does have lawyers and are unlikely to be willing to negotiate a private license. For non-GNU software, agreed, but, "This vendor went out of business and we have no idea where the copyright ended up" isn't unheard of either.)