Interestingly, none of these are GPL as far as I can see.

Poor poor Stallman :'(

The reason open source software licensed non GPL is more successful is probably because businesses see it as less of a risk. The language of the GPL is basically "you SHALL share your source even if you are offering SaaS" (see the GPL v3) and this is a risk businesses don't want to take, being railroaded into sharing proprietary systems.

The BSD license, and other more permissive licenses are much more appealing to the commercial market. For example I can't put GPL code in my ue4 game or make it GPL, as I dont have permission to open source unreal engine. Usually, the hands of the author are already tied by many license agreements...

I don't get people's hatred of GPL. If you don't like the terms of the licence it's simple - don't use the software. Same as it is with any other software. Comparing it to BSD and other more permissive licences just smacks of whining "They let me use their software as I want without paying, why don't you?". The people making such comments never seem to complain that proprietary software doesn't allow that either.

I don't get people's hatred of GPL. If you don't like the terms of the licence it's simple - don't use the software. Same as it is with any other software. Comparing it to BSD and other more permissive licences just smacks of whining "They let me use their software as I want without paying, why don't you?". The people making such comments never seem to complain that proprietary software doesn't allow that either.

I don't hate GPL, just the people who push it and claim that "access to source code" is some kind of freedom or right. That garbage gets on my nerves, and Stallman himself is little more than a homeless lunatic at this point. I'm not interested in having the open source religion preach at me.

GPL makes sense to me for application type code, though. It's a solid choice for Blender, or GIMP, or even Linux, and I don't fault them for it. It's an absurd choice for libraries, but it is the library owner's choice to make.

I don't hate GPL

Neither do I. If you dig into my history in development from my rather public profile here you'll see that I created a couple of well known open source projects within the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) community. However as a professional developer common sense dictates that I would never allow GPL v3 code to pollute the codebase in my day job where freedom to the source code would potentially ruin us and give our competitors keys to the kingdom. In the world outside of academia and Linux, open source raises more issues for most companies than it solves once you move from just using it as a software user to developing and extending it...

Anyone who can convince me that putting GPL code into your work codebase might be a good idea will sure have some interesting and convincing arguments for it that I would be excited to hear as they might very well change my whole outlook on the matter. Until then my mind is made up purely from personal experience in the field of software development...

The reason open source software licensed non GPL is more successful is probably because businesses see it as less of a risk. The language of the GPL is basically "you SHALL share your source even if you are offering SaaS" (see the GPL v3) and this is a risk businesses don't want to take, being railroaded into sharing proprietary systems.

You might want to read the license again, the SaaS clause (sourcecode access to users interacting with the software) is only in the AGPL, GPLv3 is perfectly safe for SaaS (The SaaS stuff was included as an optional clause in early v3 drafts but ended up in its own separate license instead to make things easier for people)

I don't get people's hatred of GPL. If you don't like the terms of the licence it's simple - don't use the software. Same as it is with any other software. Comparing it to BSD and other more permissive licences just smacks of whining "They let me use their software as I want without paying, why don't you?". The people making such comments never seem to complain that proprietary software doesn't allow that either.

Because often in a commercial setting, paying is fine, gpl is not, there is plenty of GPL software i would use if instead of GPL it was paying and commercial, or if it was bsd, but GPL is a big no go. And quite often it's not possible to license GPL software on another license even if paying because it wasn't planned for at the beggining and there are too many contributors.

I don't get people's hatred of GPL. If you don't like the terms of the licence it's simple - don't use the software.

I don't hate GPL. I'm just sad when it forces me to do just that. Not use the software :(

I don't hate GPL, just the people who push it and claim that "access to source code" is some kind of freedom or right. That garbage gets on my nerves, and Stallman himself is little more than a homeless lunatic at this point. I'm not interested in having the open source religion preach at me.

GPL makes sense to me for application type code, though. It's a solid choice for Blender, or GIMP, or even Linux, and I don't fault them for it. It's an absurd choice for libraries, but it is the library owner's choice to make.

While I agree Stallman is more like a lunatic, he does have a point in that we should be in control on the software that runs on our PC.
You can't hack or spy a lightbulb or fridge. But add a CPU to them and bam! it's programmable and possibly out of our control. The problem is relatively new in human history.

So the question is what are we willing to give up, the comfort of having a nice black box (*cough*Skype, Windows 10, Lenovo's superfish, Carrier IQ*cough*), or the freedom to choose what our devices run.
The thing is Stallman sees giving up that freedom as the fall of civilization, most people don't.

Nonetheless, some months ago a relative had aquired a giant JVC TV, but the SW sucked (most prominent problem was that subtitles were unreadable small and had poor Unicode support; which is an issue when your relatives don't speak english).
I saw that it made extensive use of GPL software, so I decided to give it a try to enhance the SW.
Result? The vendor made it extremely obscure how to get the source code; and once I found it, turns out you have to order a physical CD-ROM (no download) and pay for it (including international shipping), not to mention no word on instructions on how to flash the TV with custom SW (no, it's not enough to distribute the source code!). In the end I gave up. I was extremely pissed, it was a blatant violation of the GPL by a company that is making profit out of it.

Actually a company can charge you for the source code without violating the GPL. But once you paid for it you can redistribute for free and they can't do anything about it. You should look if someone else got the code and put it to download somewhere!

But yes I agree it's stupid they made it that way, especially since they probably won't make a lot of profit from it.