Honestly, I think the best way to promote open source licenses over free software copyleft licenses is to make sure the GPL has obvious, proven teeth.
That way, commercial companies that don't want to risk the successful lawsuit and just want to build on existing code will go the MIT/BSD route exclusively; and GPL can remain in the academic and the ideologically-driven free software sector where it's really much more suited.
If a company then wants to actually be a free software-based company, more power to them, but there'll be a lot less stumbling into that situation and half-assing the ethics of it like we see now.
If nothing else, giving the GPL teeth will force the confrontations and precedents that finally define the boundaries of the copyleft concept and let people make more informed choices.
They primarily provide truly fantastic infrastructure and support for major projects like Git, Mercuial, Boost, PyPy, Busybox, Selenium, and more. For example, the Conservancy is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, which allows donations to those member projects to be tax-deductible in the United States. They also hold assets on behalf of projects, provide basic legal services to members, and assist in contract negotiation when a project needs to, say, rent a venue for a conference.
They're also the organizational home for Outreachy, which was formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women and run by the GNOME project.
I donated $250 last year to support those efforts, and I plan to do the same this year.
VMWare knew the software was licensed under GPL for years. They chose to violate the terms of the license - that's what matters here. They could have chosen to base off BSD licensed code, but they did not
Would you be ok with them breaking the terms of the MIT/BSD license?I'm not familiar with the MIT/BSD restrictions, but I think one of them is to acknowledge original author? How would you feel if they violated that?
I didn't donate anything either. FOLLOW THESE TERMS OR I WILL SUE YOU is not a good ethos for open source IMO. It leads so easily to MY WAY OR NO WAY, and that's not a good mindset for developers.
Thank copyright for that - as that's how the law is written. You get access to someone else's IP (which is a stupid fucking concept, IMO, but anyways..) under the terms the authors want or not at all.
Derp.
Have you read any proprietary software license before? Do you have an iPhone? What planet are you from? Your comment made me go and donate again now.
Excuse me, igl, I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as large companies, are in fact, GNU/large companies, or as I've recently taken to calling them, GNU plus large companies.
Large companies are not capitalist entities unto themselves, but rather a semi-free component of a fully functioning capitalist system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full corporate person as defined by law.
Many capitalist systems run with a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used in large companies today is often ignored, and many citizens are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really are large companies, but they are just a part of the wider system. Large companies are the parts we see every day: the people we buy goods and services from, allocating the world's resources for their customers. Large companies are an essential part of a capitalist system, but useless by themselves; they can only function in the context of a complete capitalist system. Large companies normally exist in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with large companies added, or GNU/Large companies. All the so-called large companies are really distributions of GNU/large companies.
