Just like there are no barriers to changing the GPL so it is compatible with the CDDL, other than the FSF not wanting to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribu...
CDDL is a bit weird. It's a free license that has a pointless restriction merely in order to make it GPL incompatible. Why people want to make things deliberately GPL incompatible is beyond me.
It didn't make itself "deliberately incompatible" with all free licenses before it, for example MIT/X11 is definitely compatible. Why is the original BSD license singled out?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
Many people besides you believe proprietary software is harmful enough to enact defense mechanisms when proprietary software vendors harm the user and lock down free software into their products.
Well, we're in a thread in an article about the GPL, what did you expect? :-)
Furthermore, I'd argue that a lot of those defense mechanisms that copyleft supporters claim are necessary cause much more harm to Free Software than they do to proprietary software. The ability to use GCC for static analysis, for example, was muddied for many years by the GCC team's unwillingness to create a suitable API out of fear that it would become easier for proprietary software teams to use GCC without contributing. Meanwhile, proprietary compiler chains, like those Microsoft provided, were easily able to create those same tools because they were not driven by such fears. Additionally, you have statements from people like RMS trying to memory hole software ( http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html ) that doesn't agree with his political views. While the goals may be noble, the route the free software community has chosen to get there has devolved into stubbornness and childishness to the detriment of everyone.
That is irrelevant if DTrace used copyright assignment to ensure that there was always one copyright holder, regardless of the number or affiliations of contributors. I honestly don't know if they did or not, but from what I've heard in this thread it sounds like they did.
I would like to know your source or methodology for making that statement.
Freshmeat: 21185 projects tagged "GPL", 49 projects tagged "CDDL", 2500 projects tagged "BSD", 1807 projects tagged "BSD Revised", 1311 projects tagged "MIT/X", 1079 projects tagged "Apache 2.0", 314 projects tagged "MPL"
Sourceforge: of 1236 "OSI Approved" listed via the search refinement interface, 983 GPLv2, 22 BSD, 10 Apache 2.0, 8 MIT.
Unfortunately, neither Github or Oholo provide aggregated license information or it's not easy to find [0]. I did find this two year old post [1] about licenses of the most watched repositories on github, but popularity of the project isn't necessarily an indicator of popularity of the use of the license -- except as much as the type of license indicates which projects people will want to use because the the license lets them contribute. I do vaguely remember some random blog posts that attempted to do license counts in a repeatable and objective way, but my google-fu is failing me right now.
These are hardly conclusive numbers, and it becomes difficult to consider it in aggregate. Is all of OpenBSD considered one "project", as it's effectively distributed as one piece, or are the individual components themselves projects? Is everything in GNU core-utils one project? Maybe each binary counts as the use of the license. However, just going by these services' self-promoted "project" delineation being ~10x in favor of GPL (GPLv3, LGPL may or may not be included in the above numbers), the non-GPL licenses seem to be significantly low enough that "The GPL is the world's most popular license" may be a reasonably safe, even if not entirely accurate, position to take. I suspect that if you pick 10 projects at random, more than half of them will be GPL.
[0] A four year old post on this not being straight forward on github at that time. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/github/9WH6LtsPYtM
If you summarize for GPL/LGPL and what projects are compatible, it winds up being about 45% of projects GPL/LGPL and up to 87% or more of all open source projects are compatible with the license. I go over it in a handy chart here: http://johnhaller.com/useful-stuff/open-source-license-popul...
As thwarted said, it can be problematic looking at 'projects' as something like bootstrap on github, which is MIT licensed, has over 24,000 forks. Now, most of those are nonsense and have no changes (or at least nothing useful) but do you count that as 24,000 projects?
Beyond that, given how Linus himself thinks that 'Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did. ' and him attributing it as being a huge part of why Linux became such a success, I'd say there would zero chance of a Linux license change even if it was all up to Linus, which of course it is not.