The Failure of the GPL

[vermaden]

A great article by David Chisnall why GPL sucks.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1390172

Interesting quote from that article:

Even the Free Software Foundation can't manage to get it right.
Version 3 of the LGPL, for example, is incompatible with version
2 of the GPL. This has caused a problem recently for a few GNU
library projects that wanted to move to LGPLv3 but were used
by other projects that were GPLv2-only.

The official stance is that projects shouldn't be v2-only, they
should always be v2-or-later. I'll let you try to persuade Linux
to switch. Oh, and good luck with PDF readers, too; the only
open source PDF readers at the moment are based on xpdf,
which is GPLv2-only. The FSF is frantically trying to write a
new PDF library to get around this limitation, and licensing it
as GPLv3-or-later.

[TerryP]

The GPL in my opinion is likely the biggest brain fart in computer history.... since the Seattle Computer Products & Microsoft deal

[Business_woman]

Anyone actually read the 900000000000 page GPL doc ?

[Beastie]

Nah, no one bothers reading long texts. It's so frustrating! People always fall asleep before the end, and when they wake up they've forgot where they were.

And computer users usually don't read the fabulous manuals.

And parliamentarians usually don't read the laws they pass.

And ... etc., etc., ...

[BSDfan666]

I will have not and will not read the entire text of the GPL licence, it is an excessive amount of useless verbiage.

[TerryP]

I've read the GPL and LGPL versions 2 at least half a dozen times.

GPLv3, I've only been able to stomach reading once or twice.... on the upside, it caused an increasing quantity of code in my home directory to fall under the beer-ware license, should they ever need distribution lol.

[Oko]

We can bitch all we want about GPL but the truth of the matter is that as long as there are no BSD binary utilities (linker and assembler) all BSDs can be wiped of the face of the earth in a split of a second if the GNU people want that. It is amazing that so many years after the release 4.4. BSD light nobody in BSD camp have not had a need to rewrite complete tool chain. Fully functional PCC would be a great first step but the only people who have publicly acknowledged the real Achilles tendon of BSDs (GNU Binutils) are AerieBSD developers.

[BSDfan666]

Given the skills and talent demonstrated by BSD developers, replacing the current GNU elements is not impossible.

Many projects have sparked up in the FreeBSD community related to replacing binutils with some BSD licenced ELF object manipulators.

The PCC project intends to replace GCC, altough this effort requires additional funding and ports to a few additional architectures.. but it's surely making impressive progress.

Recent commits to the OpenBSD tree related to mandoc(1) appears goal oriented as well, intended to replace another big GNU beast.. groff.

As lovely as AerieBSD sounds, it is simply a group of renegade OpenBSD developers whining about Theo de Raadt not being overly respectful of their emotional requirements.

The developers are clearly aware that newer releases of GCC/binutils are (..or may be) licenced under version 3 of the GPL.. but the one thing you need to remember is that BSD has existed long before the GNU project was a gleam in Stallman's eye.

[Beastie]

What about LLVM/clang?

[Oko]

Originally Posted by Beastie

What about LLVM/clang?

What about it? It is not even complete compiler. It uses certain parts of GCC and even if it was a complete compiler you still need binary tools. LLVM is just the easiest solution for i386 specific projects like FreeBSD to move from GCC which changed its license into GPLv3 for version 4.xxx and above which makes it unusable in any production environment. To my knowledge LLVM is useless on any non-Wintel hardware which might be good enough for FreeBSD and DragonFly but not for Net and OpenBSD.