news.cnet.com — In July 2007, version 3 of the GNU General Public License barely accounted for 164 projects. A year later, the number had climbed past 2,000 total projects. Today, as announced by Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona, the number of open-source projects licensed under GPLv3 is at least 56,000.
Jul 26, 2009 View in Crawl 4
raitchisonJul 27, 2009
You are getting buried for your "ungood" post, as will I for pointing that out.
honoredmuleJul 27, 2009
It depends whose freedom you're protecting primarily. GPL puts users first, BSD puts businesses first, and either serves the developers in differing and subjective ways.
rick888Jul 27, 2009
"Ignorance is strong with this one. Apache and Mozilla "foundation", in other words, they are non-profit."Even if a company is non-profit developers, employees, and CEOs can take home hundreds of thousands per year."Mac OSX gained market share because they have a complete solution type of company. They provide the hardware with the software specifically tuned for that hardware."If the operating system was horrible and difficult to use, it wouldn't sell. However, it looks good, it's easy to use, and is popular as a result. The linux community should learn from their success."Whatever... there is no point to responding to a troll like you. The BSD license and the GPL license are two completely different monsters."I know, it's easier to pass me off as a troll than actually put some intelligence into your posts. The BSD license and the GNU are two different monsters. One is about freedom and the other is not.
myztryJul 28, 2009
I find it amusing that Steve Ballmer doesn't even register in some people's heads.
Closed AccountJul 28, 2009
123 is nuts. Bat-s**t crazy.
init100Jul 28, 2009
"I DO want to learn with it, and maybe use a few snippets occasionally without the fear of something coming up later and I have to open my entire program up. There are only so many ways to write 1+1=2."If you are really just after a few short snippets, you have probably no reason to fear anything. Simple statements are unlikely to be copyrightable. It's their combination to make a larger piece of code that is protected by copyright.Besides, you cannot be forced to open your code, since no judge will issue an order for you to do that if you are sued. You can be forced to stop distribution, and you can be forced to pay damages, but you can't be forced to open your code."But even LOOKING at the code to learn from it scares me. Because then I know the implementation, and my code is going to look similar if not almost exactly the same."I suggest you bring some evidence that this kind of small-mindedness is common or even exists in the open source community. In other words, please supply sources to court cases and/or threats from the OSS community against people looking at their code to learn. Most OSS developers would probably be delighted that you want to use their code as an example for learning.What developers of GPL software don't like is the copying and pasting of large parts of their code into proprietary projects. I don't think that you'll run into that problem, unless that's what you really want to do.