News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The time has come to stand up for the GPL. Parent comment

Re:The time has come to stand up for the GPL by wongarsu on Friday March 06, 2015 @10:37AM (#9157498)
As long as the Linux kernel exists, the GPL won't die. As long as cooperation want to use Linux, they will touch GPL'd software. As long as you don't modify that software, there's no harm to the cooperation.

Besides, there's compelling reasons for companies to GPL software they code which doesn't overlap with their core business. If you happen to code a new testing framework because you need one, you can GPL it and profit from the community improving it. In that case you don't really care about adoption, you care about getting improvements back, which is the strength of the GPL. It's a great license for infrastructure code, just not for your main product.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The time has come to stand up for the GPL by zak_mc_kracken on Friday March 06, 2015 @11:48PM (#9161035)
> As long as the Linux kernel exists, the GPL won't die.

So the GPL is alive in the same sense that COBOL is alive: because there's still some software out there that uses it.

Great.

That's a pretty useless definition with a ridiculously low bar, though.

The simple truth is that hardly any new project created in the past ten years has picked the GPL. And just for that reason, it's dying. It will never be technically dead, but it's certainly dead from a practical standpoint.

[ Parent | on HN ]