[Ilugc] Understanding Free and Open source code licenses
- From: metherid@xxxxxxxxx (Rahul Sundaram)
- Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 03:23:04 +0530
On 02/10/2011 05:07 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
2. Company mode (free) - where the project is mainly run by a company
and the said company does not have any proprietary products based on the
project in question. Usually these companies are able to attract large
number of developers because the developers know that the open source
version they are working on is the same version that the company is
working on. Companies almost invariably choose the GPL as suits are
scared that some one may 'steal' their code. Any way a prime example of
this type is Red hat.
I have yet to see any evidence that organizations prefer GPL for control
or they prefer GPL at all and in any case, Red Hat as a example of
that is incorrect. Take Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora and you
will find that majority of packages have code that is developed outside
of Red Hat and Red Hat serves as a integration point. It is clear
according to several surveys that majority of FOSS developers who are
hobbyists prefer GPL and not merely organizations and the motivations
are described for those who bothered to look as well . Also when Red
Hat does development of a new project, the license of the project is
chosen on a case by case basis. I can give you examples of various
licenses that Red Hat has chosen for new projects. a) Libvirt, LGPL
b) FreeIPA , GPLv3, c) Deltacloud, Apache, D) Red Hat directory
server, GPLv2 + exceptions, E) LibXML2, MIT. I am sure there are
others.
There is the curious case of PHP where a company
has 'downgraded' it's license from GPL to a BSD style license. Wonder
why ;-) Sort of knocks the apparent logic of the wine license change
into a hat.
Not really. A license change is not a downgrade or a upgrade. That
concept has no legal meaning. Also if anything it knocks down the idea
the organizations prefer GPL. The motivations will have to be
evaluated based on the project in question
Rahul
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