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Comment by anthonyrubin | Hacker News Reader

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anthonyrubin

Fiction can be fun, but I find the reference section much more enlightening.

Apache License: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

Perl's license: http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_1_0

Python's license: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0.1/license/

PostgreSQL's license: http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence

Rails' license: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/License

More of the open source world does just fine without the GPL than you'd care to admit. The various BSD projects are also doing just fine without constant hype and Slashdot announcements.

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> More of the open source world does just fine without the GPL than you'd care to admit.

60% of projects on Freshmeat use the GNU GPL. If you include other copyleft licenses, such as the LGPL, this is nearer 70%. -- http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license

Copylefted software includes such important projects as:

The Linux kernel.

Languages such as: C, C++, Objective C, Ada (all through gcc); Java.

Database engines: MySQL.

GUIs and toolkits such as: Qt, KDE, GTK+, GNOME.

GCC is particularly important, because nearly all open source projects are compiled with it or written in languages whose implementation uses GCC.

Look, I wasn't going to list out every popular open source project that doesn't use the GPL and I never claimed that there aren't useful projects that do use the GPL. I simply wanted to counter the mistaken notion that software without a GPL license sits in some small niche and all such projects have small inferior communities.

That being said, Freshmeat is a horrible way to support whatever point you were trying to make.

When exactly did I say all BSD-licensed software have small inferior communities? do I write so poorly people have trouble parsing my posts?

As I pointed out myself (and apparently you never got that far down my post) it is possible to form vibrant communities around BSD-licensed products. I even mentioned Apache as one of them.

My point was that BSD gets less investment because it's so easy to take away what you contribute and to use it to compete against you.

And thanks for the five pointers. Unless you can come up with a list two orders of magnitude larger, I consider my point fairly well demonstrated.

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