Great summary on Jalkut's GPL essay

John Gruber: "In some sense, Jalkut's essay could be considered a big "Duh" - a statement of the obvious. To wit: that GPL-licensed software projects discourage participation from developers working on anything other than other GPL-licensed software projects. That's pretty much the stated goal of the FSF. BSD-licensed projects encourage participation from developers working on just about anything." - It's not that Open Source is bad, it's just restrictive. Gruber's points are fantastic. I think there's a lot of FSF developers that see Open Sourced projects as free, but they see things from a different perspective. Open Source is socialism, BSD style licenses are more like a democracy. If I used a piece of Open Source software and found a bug, and was able to fix it, I'd be happy to give that back to the community. I wouldn't, however, build a business on top of it.

It's not bad, it's just not as open as people would like you to believe.

Labels: Development, Open Source