On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Joerg Schilling Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
You seem to be missinformed: When cdrtools have been 100% GPL, it was attacked by Debian _because_ it was 100% GPL and because the GPL is a frequently missinterpreted license.
...so I decided to choose a less problematic license than the GPL.
The GPL is designed to restrict distribution of combinations of things that are not all-GPL if any component is GPL. So any other license is equally problematic as long as GPL components might exist. The 'less problematic' solution is dual licensing like perl uses unless you want to apply restrictions one way or the other.
I was attacked by Debian _for_ using the GPL and it seems that you did not help at that time. I will not use a license again after I was attacked _because_ I used this specific license.
Umm, have they dropped perl?
The GPL is discouraged by Debian...
You should think aboiut why you did not help to defend the GPL in 2005.
I'm not a fan of the GPL because of its viral and divisive nature, especially for anything that could be considered library code, and because it prevents the distribution of any number of potentially useful combinations of components (the current poster child being zfs on linux, but the issue has always been obvious). But, GPL-encoumbered code is not going away, nor are the companies that use it specifically because they don't want better versions than what they ship to be allowed to exist.
I'm just thankful that Larry Wall and others have realized that the way to side-step the problem is to dual-license so that the code can be distributed as GPL or a less restrictive license as the circumstances require without getting involved in someone else's religious or political wars.