In academia my impression is that the decline of the GPL is due to business models more than ideals. There was a period of popularity in the 1990s and 2000s where dual-licensing GPL/commercial was used as an attempt to both open-source the code while still making money from commercial users who would pay for a non-GPL license. The copyleftness in that strategy wasn't really about agreeing with RMS, but about making sure you'd get paid if the next version of Matlab shipped with your code in it. But only a handful of projects that've tried that have been successful at making any money from it (the Stanford Parser is one example that has been).
My anecdotal impression is that the trend is therefore towards picking either openness or money as the goal, instead of trying the dual strategy. If openness is the goal, you pick MIT/BSD, because they're simpler and you hope lots of people will pick up your code, and maybe you'll get paid in citations and PR. If money is the goal, go for a full commercial licensing strategy, and either don't release the code publicly at all, or release it with a research-use-only/no-commercial-use clause.
What I've found is that open sourcing components that are not central to your business, but that your business depends upon, provides you with free stress testing, bug fixes, and enhancements. That's a huge win, and leaves you with more resources to concentrate on things that ARE central to your business.
In order to maximize uptake on your open sourced component, it makes sense to have an uncomplicated license. Take a look at the following licenses:
When I'm looking to use some component I found on the internet, part of my decision is based on the potential for legal pitfalls. I suspect that others feel the same way.
"The described trend is caused by consciously rejecting GPLs ideals,"
I very highly doubt that.
There are 3 cases I can think of:
1 - Business related models: "we're scared of GPL, we don't know what it is, but force devs to use smth else or code it from scratch"
2 - We're devs and due to 1, and possibly startups, we'll want non-GPL code. We'll also start to spam the community how GPL is bad in any possible way.
3 - All the devs are telling me GPL sux. I'm a cool and hip new person I'll do what they say to fit in. (I don't even care about what the GPL is made for).
Now, one could wonder, why'd they want to even use BSD or similar licenses? They could just go with public domain. THat's "real" freedom to their ears isn't it? Anyone does anything they want with it. Perfect.
Not so. They use BSD for credits. BSD forces you to retain copyright in the code, and that means if your name is in the code, you're getting a job very, very easily.
So you see, all the above only tells me one thing:
People who know are misleading others (like you just did) on purpose for financial reasons, not because GPL ideals are wrong.
It would be OK if they at least mentioned the reasons in these simple terms. But that wouldn't help them achieve their goals, if others keep on using the GPL.
"Public domain" is an unclear concept, I am under the impression that in many countries there is no such thing as "public domain" from a strict legal perspective. BSD is (for me) the closest thing to a clear legal "public domain", and that is why I use it.
Also, the GPL is incompatible with the iOS store, which is a serious problem for many people.
This is correct. For example, German law is based on the concept of 'Urheberrecht', ie 'creator's rights', instead of 'copyright'.
This is the reason why copyright notices (which were mandatory in the US until 1989 according to Wikipedia) were never necessary in Germany and why there's no direct equivalent to public domain:
As soon as you create something worthwhile, you gain creator's rights, and as you remain the creator no matter what you do or what usage rights you grant to others, you can't give them away completely. There's a somewhat recent, rather embarrassing quote by German politician and lawyer Volker Kauder, who claimed to have acquired creator's rights to some images he used on his homepage without having the appropriate usage rights.
I don't quite understand....why is it shameful if a developer wants to retain ownership/claim authorship over the code that he spent time and effort in developing?
If there was a GPLed project for every paranoid rant on how anyone interested in any other license is trying to mislead people and destroy the GPL, TFA would never have been written.
I don't think that most people understand the GPL. Everybody understands the basic spirit of it, but there are lots of details spread throughout that huge document. The preamble is longer than many permissive licenses. .That there is a preamble at all speaks to the complexity. It's too much for a small group or individual without access to a lawyer, and I don't think people in these cases are going to use a license that they don't fully understand.
I just took the time to read the GPL both versions 2 and 3. It is pretty cut and dry as far as licenses go. Do you have any actual evidence that small groups or individuals are having trouble understanding it to the extent that it would have a statistically significant impact on its uptake?
