Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

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It's frustrating that this idea persists. Yes, the GPL was explicitly rejected, but no, it wasn't because of fear of Linux compatibility. It is true that we refused to dual-license (we didn't want to create a license-based fork), but the reason the GPLv2 was rejected is actually very simple: the strong copy-left left way too much ambiguity for our IHV partners. In particular, we wanted to allow proprietary, closed-source drivers to be shipped for OpenSolaris without a Linux-esque "taint" of the system. We also wanted distros to be created that had entirely proprietary components -- including the binaries that constituted elements of the system that we could not ourselves open source due to third party restrictions.

So yes, we rejected GPLv2 -- but it was not because we were afraid of becoming an organ donor to Linux, but rather because it would have overly restricted the freedoms of our community. In this regard, we were forward looking: it is now broadly accepted that the GPLv2 is an anti-collaborative license[1], explaining its acute decline for new work.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/08/01/post-revolutionary-op...

>it is now broadly accepted that the GPLv2 is an anti-collaborative license[1],

Broadly accepted where? You certainly draw grand conclusions from head-bobbing at a talk you made.

It's the licence used for I dare say the largest collaborative open source project in the world, Linux. GPL is the most widely used open source licence, used in tons of collaborative projects, from the top of my head: gcc, git, mercurial, qemu, ffmpeg, x264, blender, gimp, inkscape, mplayer, emacs, etc are all examples of other collaboratively developed GPL licenced projects.

And how exactly would it be 'anti-collaborative'? If anything it's a great licence for 'collaborative development' as all participants are legally bound by the licence to release their changes in source form when they distribute.

> GPLv2 is an anti-collaborative license

I see quite the contrary.

Any license that allows you to release your derived work as a proprietary and closed-source decreases the amount of collaboration because now nobody else can collaborate on your proprietary fork. One of the reasons for, say, IBM not to give part of AIX to FreeBSD, is that they fear, justifiably, HP may take their collaboration and incorporate it into HP-UX, giving it an advantage over IBM's proprietary product. If IBM incorporates some übercool part of AIX into Linux, HP cannot use that to benefit HP-UX. Fear of becoming an organ donor is lessened because the receiver can't run away with your liver.

Do you recall why other popular licenses at the time (apache-2.0, MIT, BSD(new), etc) were rejected?

None of those are copyleft.

Ha. Good point.

If those were the concerns, it could have been dual licensed.

Or used an Apache-style license.

IF you are the author you are free to license your work under as many licenses as you want, and not bound by the GPL at all - you inherently have that right.

The rest - agreed.

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