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> how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions

Is this not one of the the main purposes of the GPL? To prevent companies taking the users freedom by "building proprietary solutions".

> It also fails to mention that sometimes providing the user with the best products means protecting the investment and creative effort painstakingly poured into development of a product.

Nope it doesn't fail to mention this. Your opinion here is totally orthogonal to the original premise of the free software movement (and of the GPL). The GPL was written on the premise that users are better off with objectively worse performing software that maintain the four freedoms.

You probably disagree with me on whether software freedom is more important than software quality but it is important to understand the basis of our disagreement first.

>providing the user with the best products

You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.

If you don't want to generate a return on the investment of your time, it means you have an alternate source of wealth. Most of us do not have that luxury, and therefore cannot share in the vision of Free Software.

> if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.

In who's eyes?

Consumers want the best product.

Investors want a payout.

How does GPL satisfy either of these?

GPL doesn't have the nimbleness to be viable with the market. It doesn't respect creativity and time of developers or investors - leaving consumers left to pick a proprietary / permissive alternative.

You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs [1]

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435

> You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs

That's fine but it's only one level deep. What about the people that download your source and accept the terms of your license? They are totally free to make binary blobs and refuse to give source to their downloaders or their changes back to you.

The GPL directly addresses that and keeps the code free, no matter who gets it from who. It's really the only way to guarantee software freedom.

Consumers get better software

Investors want a quicker payout.

That's basically the economic argument for Open Source.

How does the GPL support this better than complicit licenses?

You'll have to pay me to find out. Because market.

> The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions. > Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative.

I'm really not a huge fan of the GPL but you have to realize those are by design. To a supporter of the license, that's actually a plus.

> How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far.

If the GPL doesn't fit your business plan, just don't use it. Do you see Open-Source projects using leaked closed-source code (or complaining that they can't do so)? No one is preventing companies from rewriting equivalent code and the authors had the right to select whatever terms they wanted when they created their project. It's their creative output after all.

We also have lives to live - limited resources, money, and days on Earth.

It's more intricate that the way you view it outside the world of academics, non-profits and eurozone states with social benefits that give you the freetime to do that.

If you're open to knowing more, I could elaborate.

> there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users.

Lack of citation and data noted.

Four sentences later in TFA:

But when I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape regularly), most of these are under the GPL.

Those are three major data points. Do you have any data or citations to contribute?

> I'm assuming good faith and going to approach this as I would a fellow colleague :)

Wow, this is the most passive-aggressive display of good faith I've seen so far.

even if I work at a startup and I can do what the hell I want, I still go with lgpl, mit or bsd and stay miles from gpl

gpl is just annoying to deal with, especially v3.

downvote edit: fanboy gotta fanboy. it's not like downvoting can change my previous experiences.

Why is v3 more annoying for you than v2?

Can't speak for commenter above, but v3 has a "patent license" clause that is literally impossible for any large company to comply with.

Not just difficult or undesirable, but impossible.

GPLv3 requires you to offer a free license of any patent you have a license to that might apply to the GPLv3 software to anyone who might want to use that software. Almost any large company has at one time or another purchased broad patent licenses that cannot be sublicensed.

So GPLv3 is an absolute non-starter for any large company. You want to doom a product, license it under GPLv3. It may not instantly kill it, but it will slowly strangle it.

it is also more difficult to demonstrate project independence. if two bits touch, GPLv3 spreads.

v2 at least is worded in a way that allows non spreading if you can demonstrate the functionality can be replaced by a third party lib without altering the software functionality

also it makes unnecessarily hard to comply. in GPLv2 it was quite easy to determine who was an user and who was entitled to receive the code.

GPLv3 makes this unnecessarily difficult because it overreacted at previous GPLv2 shortcoming. Think for example deploying on a kiosk.

> Think for example deploying on a kiosk.

I thought that it depended upon who owns the kiosk and if software upgrades are a normal part of its operation?

it's worded so that any end user has a license to your code (to prevent tivoization)

Sounds absolutely within the spirit of what the GPL was intended to achieve.

What would be unfair is if a user of a photo booth kiosk was allowed to flash the firmware...

Yes it works pretty well for that, I am not saying it doesn't. I'm arguing it has impractical consequences

What is the impractical consequences if you sold a photo booth kiosk and had to give the recipient the source code for the internal software? I would assume that photo booth kiosks producers got their money from selling the physical kiosk and competition on the internal kiosk software is going be at best an minor advantage. Management software or similar could still be proprietary, through competitors could make management software that is compatible with those kiosks, which is a good thing in my book.

Customers of the kiosks however have no such right to source code, since they don't receive any copies of the software from using it. You enter, you insert a coin/cc, and out comes a photo and maybe a code which allow you to download the image to your phone. Neither is "copies" of the kiosk internal software so the license doesn't involve them.

The primary criticism of the GPLv3, from what I know, is that it's backwards incompatible with the GPLv2, creating practical problems with code sharing between v2/v3 projects. That is to say, the GPL is no longer a single "universal receiver", it's been forked.

Then there's disagreements as to whether things like Tivoization are really an issue, as Linus Torvalds for instance doesn't think it is and so sticks with the GPLv2.

Rob Landley talks about this in an interview here, among other interesting bits about computing history: https://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-11/

Actually, Torvalds couldn't relicense Linux as GPLv3 even if he wanted to, because it would require the consent of all copyright holders :)

For every company that employs personals that refuses to use the best tool for the job a competitor will employ a employee that will and the market will give the more agile company success while the other will fail.

Basic market principles. Religious stances don't save money nor will it produce better goods. Understanding what licenses is suitable where, when and how means being able to compete in highly competitive areas, and only if the market leans towards monopoly can inefficiency survive.