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Comment by alperakgun | Hacker News Reader

as far as i understand freebsd is there just because some license fanatics want to maintain a commercial-izable alternative to linux. they switching to clang doesn't mean much, because it is most probably a dogmatic, ideological move.

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I at one point suggested it was the license as well, but cpercival at the time corrected me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351634

Please stop with the accusations of dogmatism. Regardless of whether you agree with their goals or not, the reasons behind avoiding GPLv3 licensed components are very pragmatic.

The common myths and fear about GPLv3 are far from pragmatic.

I can understand those that only want permissive licensed software for components. This make sense, as otherwise the copyright license will put some requirements when distributing copies of the new work. If its proprietary components, you got to buy a license. If its copyleft components, you got to use a particular license.

But if we are talking about gplv2 vs gplv3, only a very small subset of people will ever have to care about the differences between those two licenses. It actually only comes down to two questions.

1: Are you planning to sell a product, but want to keep root access to the device after its being sold, while at the same time directly preventing giving the same access to the new owner who bought your device?

2: Are you in a patent license agreement with an other company over patents you pay for and which cover aspect of the new product?

If your answer is No and No, to those two questions, you can regard GPLv2 and GPLv3 as identical licenses. Its that simple.

There's also an issue of code contribution that some people will not experience or know about. I'm working at a large company and I can contribute to any FOSS project... unless it's gpl3 or requires a copyright assignment. In that case I have to go via a review process taking weeks to complete and involving 2 levels of management. Or I can simply fork locally, patch and never contribute back (this happens almost every time).

I doubt this is rare inside of large corporations.

The patent agreement part GPLv3 (which is the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 in regard to patents), only cover distribution rights. If you do not distribute the whole work, you can create as many code contributions you want and have as many patent license agreement at the same time. They do not interact.

For code contributions, GPLv2, GPLv3 and Apache license has the exact same deal in regard to patent grants. Actually, the text used in GPLv3 that cover patent grants of contributors, is word for word copied out of the Apache license. GPLv3 only added additional patent requirements for distribution of the complete work. My guess, for the exact reason of not discouraging companies to contribute code.

If the company review GPLv3 contributions, but do not review Apache licensed contributions, they have bitten the FUD apple.

Pretty much the same in any large corporation I worked with.

Not only for contributing, but for using as well, and with every single version change the same process must be followed.

#2 in particular seems impossible to ensure. There's no way to say "No" with any confidence. If you make a product, and someone comes to you with a patent claim asking for money, you put yourself in the position of completely rewriting your project or taking the claim all the way to court on merit. Violating a patent does not require intent, so unless you have intimate knowledge of every possible patent claim that could be made, and you are willing to fight all of them all of the way, you might as well start right off the bat without GPLv3.

There is plenty of ways to say No. If my company is distributing someone else program which is under GPL and then get sued for patent infringement, we would not be willing to pay money per unit so we can continue distribute that software. We would either rewrite the parts covered under the patent or use a different software. But paying for the privilege to distribute someone else project?

If your in a situation where you want to use someones else project, and would be willing to pay per unit to distribute it to your users, what would you pick. A patent deal to get the privilege to distribute a GPLv2 program, or a supported and legal protected proprietary program? I would pick option 3, ie, write my own program or fight the patent depending on which ever is affordable. In this regard, what license the original program was in matter very little if at all.

An ironic statement considering the backstory behind GCC's obfuscation and complexity.

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