Comment by zeveb
9 years ago
> Full-on GPL taints your software, such that you have to be extremely careful not to use any libraries that are GPL'd if you want to release it under any other sort of license.
Why would you want to release under any other sort of license? Why do you wish to restrict your users' right to use, modify & share code?
> can you imagine the clusterfuck if, say, the NPM community defaulted to using GPL
That sounds wonderful: an entire ecosystem of free software.
> Why do you wish to restrict your users' right to use, modify & share code?
Not everyone agrees that this is a right.
Possession is nine tenths of the law. You have no right to tell people what to do with their own computers.
>You have no right to tell people what to do with their own computers.
You seem confused. The discussion here is about copyright law and intellectual property licensing. Code is a series of 1s and 0s that can be duplicated at almost no cost. Me "possessing" it doesn't deprive anyone else of anything.
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Except, I work on GPL v2 systems, and we can't link to GPL v3 libraries. No other license I've worked with has this incompatiblity problem.
> Except, I work on GPL v2 systems, and we can't link to GPL v3 libraries.
The standard way to use GPL v2 is to use this verbiage:
If someone doesn't do that, I don't know what to say.
That's the wrong direction. You can use v2 code with that sentence in the license in a v3 codebase, not vice-versa (unless you upgrade your codebase to v3 entirely, but since GPLv2 was explicitly mentioned that probably is not an option for whatever reason).
At some point in the far distant past, someone decided they didn't want to give the FSF the ability to apply any license they like to their software (which is reasonable, the FSF could in principle make GPL v4 -- All your source are belong to us).
While that choice might have been a mistake, it would now be an impossible effort to get all contributor's permission to change, so we are stuck with v2.