How worried are you about application licenses?

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free as in speech, but definitely not as in beer or attorney fees: I touched on this particular issue in response to another article, but it bears repeating that licensing is a legitimate concern of businesses that use a mix of software. The cost of compliance is very high no matter how free the software is to the company. And it doesn't matter if the mix is proprietary and open source or all open source software but with myriad licenses that require legal oversight. That's not FUD, that's reality in the litigious world in which businesses operate.

"Free" software is only free to hobbyists dabbling with a new distro. It's not free if it's redistributed and/or used in a commercial environment. The costs of compliance aren't trivial. As the article Dana linked to notes, one particular example could've cost a company "hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of dollars" to bring software into compliance for only "FIFTY-plus" customers. Think of the scale of bringing software into compliance for an even larger operation.

I'm not picking on GPLv3 just because I think RMS is a crackpot anti-capitalist, I don't like it because its new restrictions will either cost so much that Linux and open source adoption stagnates or forces adoption of either less restrictive code (where and if available) or -- more likely -- fully proprietary systems that are easier to legally manage. And that likelihood increases the more RMS and FSF decide to add new restrictions to subsequent versions of GPL to make it less business-friendly.

That's why I see the FSF as a hindrance and liability to open source adoption. So do many developers. The following link notes a survey that found 6% of open source developers have adopted GPLv3 in their projects and 43% have no plans to adopt it.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070925/20070925006182.html?.v=1; Posted by: lucky 13 Posted on: 09/25/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use