On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Matthew Saltzman <mjs@clemson.edu> wrote:
Good for them.  (No sarcasm intended.)  But an anecdote is not a proof.
 
I'm countering the implied FUD that the GPL scares away commercial developers by pointing out how copyleft licenses can in fact attract commercial development to the open source model who would otherwise avoid it, as copyleft licenses can protect their bottom line in a way that so-called "permissive" licenses can not. And I even gave a concrete example, lets call it a case study. Which is more than what you're giving.

The GPL is not the only license that protects code released under it
from incorporation into proprietary products.  But some clauses in the
GPL prevent interoperability with other software that (for whatever
reason) was released under different licenses that even the FSF
acknowledges are in the spirit of freedom and open source.  That's too
bad for free and open-source software.

This is what you call a 'bug'. Yes, bugs are unfortunate, but bugs can be fixed. Lets look at another case study: It just so happens that the Second Life client has run in to this. It uses the APR library, which is under the Apache License 2.0, which on a technicality is incompatable with the GPLv2. Linden Lab solved this by "patching" the GPL by giving a FLOSS exception. Problem solved.

And it just so happens the FSF released a new version of the GPL, version 3 which fixes the Apache License incompatability. Unfortunately Linden Lab chose GPLv2 Only, me and others have asked them to update to GPLv3, or at least switch to GPLv2+, but it has been blown off as being rather low priority for them...