[PLUG] Copyleft bad for open source?

[Aaron Burt]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 09:49:04AM -0800, David Pool wrote:
> The Enterprise Open Source Journal recently ran an article entitled
> ???When Copyleft Is Bad for Open Source??? by Mark Driver of Gartner. In it,
> Driver makes the proposition that the GPL and other copyleft licenses
> are ???wrong???, ???second class??? and possibly against the ???ethos of open
> source???.
> 
> I thought about it for awhile and decided to pen a response:
> 
> http://www.news4neighbors.net/article.pl?sid=05/11/28/1732242

I wish I could have read the original.  I can do Flash and just about
any media and website on my Ubuntu system, but I think you have to be
running IE on Winders to access their ASP-based site.  I'd question
their perspective on OSS, but I'm not their target-market anyway.

Your response is interesting, and you clearly have some strong ideas,
but they could perhaps be stated more clearly.  I was having a hard
time making out which license (or class of licenses) was which, and
I suspect that was inherited from the muddled arguments of the
original piece.

I've seen and heard a lot of muddled arguments about how a BSD-
licensed Linux kernel would be better for bidness, mostly from
bidness folks with no OSS background*.  There are many responses to
them, but the best IMHO is, "if you don't like it, use BSD Unix."

Many businesspeople want to justify taking stuff from the Commons.
Witness the various copyright fights, timber battles and land-grabs
going on.  To me, this is no different.

You may find these interesting:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/

Good luck,
  Aaron 

*Note, for instance, the fact that this person even thinks that
 relicensing Linux is within the realm of possibility.