[nrclark]

Just a note - I appreciate this discussion, and your point of view! Thanks for having it.

Ease of contribution is a problem for sure, and it's one that GPLv3 was intended to address. My main point is that the changes from GPLv2 actually had the opposite effect for a whole group of developers.

Instead of encouraging -more- development, I feel like maybe it's just driven developers away and onto GPLv2, MIT, or BSD equivalents. Maybe this is intended behavior, and not an accidental side-effect. I don't know. But it's hard to dispute that it reduces the pool of potential contributors to GPLv3 packages.

GPLv3 components just aren't an option for a lot of products, regardless of whether GPLv3 is better for users (I agree that it is). I think it's really harmed the FSF a lot. With fewer installations of FSF packages, the FSF sees less participation and loses some of its clout. And that makes me sad :(

[cycloptic]

People and groups that wanted to contribute but couldn't because of locked-down devices were already driven away and discouraged from development. And it was worse for them, if you own a locked-down device you can't go and decide to run FreeBSD on it to fix that. You just can't work on it at all. The GPLv3 was drafted in response to complaints about this -- specifically, companies that were shipping Linux and Busybox and were either straight-up GPL violating, or were telling users to get lost when they asked how it would be possible to get patched software on the device in any practical sense. From my perspective, there already was a wall in between those companies locking down their devices and the rest of the community. The GPLv3 only highlighted it.