Neowin.net

Very interesting, but most of that goes right over my head.

I don't see why anyone uses GPL in the first place, it's a silly license that locks you in whether you want to or not. BSD is ar better and doesn't limit your ability to use yoru code as you will. even when devlping Open source software, you have to accept that it must be able to communicate with closed source apps, and in some cases, it will need to have closed source plugins and such.

The only thing achieved by using GPL is all the problems you get with Nvidia drivers or opy protection schemes not being implentable on Linux and such.

Yes, Bill would certainly love if no one used the GPL to protect their own work. Actually the GPL protects a developer b/c it lets them put their source code out there and then get changes back, and it also lets them dual license their code so they can make money for it for people who want to use it in proprietary products (see Trolltech and QT). It also has ancillary advantages such as unifying codebases and stopping the classic lock-in tactic of embrace and extend.

Keep in mind it's ONLY a distribution license. The nVidia problems are because the Linux kernel makes the (correct IMO) choice not to have stable binary interface: they want the drivers' source, and this enables them to be portable and solve security (yes you can get root exploits, see madwifi and nVidia drivers) and other buggy issues-- compare nVidia bugs that are not fixed, like black windows and problems with ACPI and suspend, and you will find the open source drivers are much higher quality.

Anyways, since the GPL is a copyright license that only comes into effect on *public distribution*, scripts like that which Ubuntu has are fine.

The only things GPL has achieved...GCC, GNU Project, Samba, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, GTK, QT, Safari (KHTML, Webkit), Mozilla/Gecko, just stupid things that anyone can replace. Who would ever use GPL! /sarcasm

I know eh? Microsoft instead decides to provide open APIs to nearly all their Windows components and a shared source initiative. But they don't like open source... ooh how evil. They're closed-source, that's SO WRONG!!
Microsoft likes DRM? You reading right? Microsoft HATES DRM, but they LIKE being able to play DRMed stuff.

No, MS likes DRM, period, so much that include it in their own products! Windows Activation, Genuine Advantage, etc.

http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment...f_0208bach.html "MS: We Like DRM"

APIs...righto, I'll ask Wordperfect and Netscape how they fared with Microsoft's open APIs with that when they had competing products. Or Samba. Or that .NET developer that MS threatened who dared to use "open APIs" (shame on him, MS says!

"Shared source" does not mean anything or provide free software benefits. It is a PR term.

I wouldn't exactly call Microsoft's APIs open. If you'll remember, they programmed in features that only Windows products could use (specifically MS Office programs) to kill off the competetion in the early 90s (anyone remember Lotus 1-2-3 ?). I wouldn't be surprised if they still had tricks like this up their sleeves.

That's really not the case, maybe they don't document everything, but that hasen't stopped other programs, free ones, from running on windows and doing a good job. There are lots of non-MS apps that people love and will use over any MS made apps. If the APIs used by both gave MS a advantage then wouldn't their apps be better?

That's a spurious argument at best, and you know it. The fact that some of the other developers (besides Microsoft) don't lock-down their APIs with DRM has nothing to do with the fact that MS has a long history of creating software that comes with unnecessary restrictions.
For example, the PC Game "Sahdowrun" is made by Microsoft to be Vista-only... but if you know which files to copy from Vista to XP you can install and run the game on XP with little trouble. (there's a bit of a hack involved, but it's dead simple.) The game doesn't depend on DX 10 or anything like that, so why did MS make it Vista-only? Simple: They want to move game development to the Vista platform, whether or not it actually needs to move there, because they want to sell more copies of Vista.
There's a hundred other examples I could give, but that was a very recent one.

Another brainwashed one... but this one is so dumb!
That ".Net developer" just created a crack for Visual Studio and released it with his plugin.
That has nothing to do with .Net Framework.

Not at all. People need to step back and get a grip first off. You don't have to use GPL to do open-source work. BSD is moving along just fine and it's got a pretty different license right there. And this is only my opinion, but I'd take FreeBSD over any linux distro when it comes to running a server.

Lots of people have good free apps that aren't under GPL, a license should never tie you down.

No, it's not wrong to dislike it. However, I read this story not as being about it being right or wrong to like it (heck MS isn't particulary fond of GPL1 or 2 either -- hence their own set of "shared source" licenses), but the matter of if the GPL3 would apply anywhere for them.

You certainly have a choice. Nobody's forcing you to licence your software under the GPL, regardless of the version you choose.

It is just about different viewpoints of what is "freedom" in software licensing.

Is it more free to use a BSD-style license where people can lock up the community code, make secret changes to it and re-license it under very un-free terms? Or to force all given freedoms GPL-style to be passed on, so that everyone downstream also receives the same freedoms you received the code under.

GPL guarantees (forces) code openness. BSD is so 'free' that people can close the code in proprietary branches/forks.

There is no right/wrong. Just differing perspectives.

LGPL is far more tolerable than GPL. The GPL guarantees that proprietry solutions (sometimes, they are the best way) cannot under any circumstances benefit from the "Free" (in quotation marks because that explicitly makes it NOT Free as in Libre) code, whereas LGPL allows closed source stuff to benefit - but any changes still go back out to benefit the original writers. If I were to use a FSF license, it'd be the LGPL. NOT the GPL. That said, looking at the stated intentions of Richard Stallman and the Free (if you do as we tell you) Software Foundation, then I would certainly choose to write my own instead.