More on Jonathan S's GPL comments Last week I posted about Jonathan S's strange comments on the GPL. Today he posted a clarification.
Basically he's got two things going on. First is to show how
great the CDDL is, and the second is he continues to slam the
GPL. The things he says about the CDDL are very interesting, and
I like the ideas. I've only skimmed the CDDL so I won't say more
than it is rather readable.
But his posting continues to slam, needlessly, the GPL. And to top it off he offers this story as justification.
The story is that at the 2005 CeBIT conference, an Open Source
programmer was going to various companies to point out how they're
delivering Linux-based products, but not following the GPL licensing
requirements by disclosing their source.
Okay, this is very strange. First he puts up this strawman of
poor 3rd world countries wanting to develop software based on open
source, and then he proposes Motorola and 12 other companies as
concrete examples of the problem. Motorola???
Motorola is hardly an example of a poor 3rd world country. Heck,
Motorola probably has yearly sales exceeding the GDP of most 3rd world
countries. And clearly Motorola has enough smart lawyers to be
able to figure out the GPL and know how to comply with it.
Yet, apparently they did not. (I haven't checked further ...)
Let me offer a counter example:
Linksys is selling several devices that use an embedded Linux.
They are also complying with the GPL, by distributing source code and a
compiler toolchain. This allows end users to customize the
products by compiling and installing modules of their own choice.
The above product is a network attached file server box. It
lets you plug in a USB2.0 box containing a disk drive, and have the
disk appear on the network. A simple little box, easy to use,
etc. But, the geeks of the world saw that and wanted more.
e.g. out of the box it supports SMB and the Windows world, but what
about those of us who use other systems? Systems that prefer NFS
over SMB? Well, we'd be out of luck, but for these geeks who
worked out how to get into the box and compile NFS support. Now
getting the box to support NFS is as simple as downloading new firmware
off a website and installing it.
But wait, that's not all. The geeks also wanted more.
Some are using these as MP3 storage in a way that lets iTunes see the
files on the network attached disk. Others are using it for other
media devices. Others are running mail servers or web sites with
it.
It's the GPL that enables this flourishing of creativity and power to the people.
