Those are fair enough comparisons. In fact, I think you've hit upon something there. If the idea of someone benefitting from your work in terms of money bothers you then BSD/MIT/ISC licenses seem bad. Personally, I'm fine with it. Apple takes FreeBSD userland and makes money? Ok! We still have FreeBSD. Someone incorporates OpenSSH code into a non-free for-profit Windows program? Ok! We still have OpenSSH.
> We still have FreeBSD. Someone incorporates OpenSSH code into a non-free for-profit Windows program? Ok! We still have OpenSSH.
There is an argument that if a high enough proportion of the FLOSS ecosystem's software ends up being adopted into proprietary products, then the community could happily move to using those proprietary products instead and then there will no longer be enough momentum in development of free upstreams and we will lose the "still have FreeBSD" and "still have OpenSSH" cases.
This argument suggested that there needs to be a certain amount of GPL software in the ecosystem to prevent the balance from being tipped this way.
This is my recollection. I have not been able to find any kind of reference to this, but I hope you get the idea.
As I pointed out in my blog post (linked below), history is littered with the corpses of proprietary spinoffs of free/open source projects. It is telling that the only example I can find currently of a proprietary spinoff eclipsing the open source version currently a) had to be released free of charge and bundled with another program, and b) is now facing renewed competition from free/open source competition in the form of Firefox and Chrome.
So it seems to be an exception which proves the rule. Proprietary spinoffs cannot, in the long run, outrun the community.
This actually seems like a counter-example: the commercial spinoffs have totally dominated in comparison to the free BSDs, which have never had particularly large market share. Through much of the 1980s and early 1990s the free BSDs had approximately zero users, whereas their commercial spinoffs had hundreds of thousands! The BSD licensing also allowed AT&T to reincorporate large chunks of the BSD code back into AT&T Unix (even Microsoft borrowed some of the sockets code for Windows). This situation was only disrupted in the 1990s by GNU and Linux, not by the free BSDs, which re-arrived only later. And even as Solaris declined, the free BSDs didn't manage to capitalize and gain its market share.
On the desktop, of course, a proprietary spinoff of the free BSDs completely obliterates the usage numbers of FreeBSD and PC-BSD: Mac OS X. It's not a pure spinoff; it also includes permissively licensed code from the CMU Mach project, among others. And it's at least semi-proprietary: Apple does release some code, but it's both incomplete and doesn't even build, so there is no free version of Darwin you can actually run.
Yes, they outran them for a while, but the only way Solaris is even surviving at all is because Sun returned it to an open license. How many users are on FreeBSD vs OpenIndiana?
I see it more in terms of user-years. Solaris got millions, FreeBSD got a tiny number. OS X now has quite a lot. The free BSDs have never been a serious force by comparison. It's not like you get to erase the 1980s and 1990s because the 2000s came after them, especially if nothing impressive happened in the 2000s either; enabling a decade+ of Solaris matters.
I think Solaris did convincingly outrun BSD. Then they were both killed by Linux. FreeBSD might be doing slightly better on life support, but that is not a great consolation prize, when Solaris did much better in the prime of life. Although I'm not sure even today the free BSD derivatives have more users than the proprietary BSD spinoffs, if you add up AIX, Oracle Solaris, HPUX, etc. QNX and derivatives like Blackberry also include considerable BSD code.
But you really have no way of verifying if these proprietary products are using permissive code. They can just run with it and save themselves a lot of work off your labor, but who knows what modifications they made.
I don't have objection to people benefiting from my work monetarily. I have some objection to people benefiting from my work by exerting power over others. How much objection and whether it is sufficient to motivate GPL (or AGPL) depends on a whole host of factors, definitely including the nature and extent of that power.
The question, really, is what you get out of it. Again, I don't like the MIT license because it allows for license changes without actual code changes.
But the question is what you get from proprietary spinoffs. If you are afraid that proprietary firms will drive away the more free software products, then the GPL seems best. On the other hand if you accept that the community will eventually prevail, then you get to see where folks think the market is, and where the community version should go to be more successful.
I wonder how Green Plum is going to deal with a BSD-licensed competitor being Postgres-XC....
more importantly I think, the BSD license allows you to think up new stuff, incorporate it with what I wrote, then not share it with the rest of the world. GPL means that every commit raises ALL boats.
