

Why I use GPL - Zed Shaw - kracekumar
http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html

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ge0rg
That post is strange regarding its use of licenses and implications, and also
is probably some years old (it is hard to say, without a date / timestamp in
it).

a) The GPL does not enforce "giving back" for server software, if that
software is only running on servers but not provided for download. The Affero
GPL [1] is meant to close this "gap".

b) Lamson 1.0, released almost two years ago [2], is actually licensed
BSD/GPL, making the point of the post moot, unless it was written before the
release.

[1] <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html>

[2] <http://lamsonproject.org/blog/2010-07-07.html>

~~~
domador
It looks like the post is from 2009:

"That was in 2004. Five years ago."

~~~
ge0rg
That would also match with the later release date. Thanks for clarifying.

------
otterley
"Let me give you an idea of how advanced Mongrel was. Remember the “new”
attack on Apache called Slowloris that was recently released? I actually
predicted that attack, and wrote Mongrel so that it was resistant (as much as
Ruby could let me). I called it the “trickle attack” and even demonstrated it.
That was in 2004. Five years ago."

Zed needs a history lesson. David Filo at Yahoo! figured it out at least 4
years before Zed did, and patched FreeBSD to provide accept filters in release
4.0. They buffer the request at the kernel level so that the application stack
doesn't even see the HTTP request until it's fully formed.

[http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=accept_filter&s...](http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=accept_filter&sektion=9)

~~~
dalke
Here's a variation I reported to Twisted in 2003:
[http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-
python/2003-J...](http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-
python/2003-June/004462.html) , and an updated version at
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.twisted/3628> .

I did not come up with that myself; I had read it elsewhere.

Is this essentially the same thing?

------
mark_l_watson
Zed wrote this a few years ago. None of my business, but I am curious if the
dual license business model for Lamson before he extended the licensing
options to include BSD.

I would like to see high profile developers like Zed and Chris Granger fund
more projects using services like Kickstarter (as Chris did for Light Table).
People who do useful work deserve to be paid for it, and this is one good
approach for well known developers.

------
minoru
The guy must be damn sure about how cool his projects are, because there's a
situation where your project is cool enough for company to use but they won't
because of GPL. It would probably work with startups (they're flexible and in
a hurry — they'll take the coolest thing around without a second thought), but
it may not work with bigger companies. Quite contrary, I believe that big
companies tend to use software licensed under BSD, though I have no personal
experience with that.

I also want to express my gratitude for a different view of startups — I
definitely never thought of them as a bunch of guys who would take as much
open source software as possible but hide the fact, all in a name of perceived
smartness, innovativeness and productivity.

~~~
zck
>...there's a situation where your project is cool enough for company to use
but they won't because of GPL.

He obviously realizes that. From the article:

>I would actually rather nobody use my software than be in a situation where
everyone is using my gear and nobody is admitting it.

~~~
minoru
Yes, he does. I wrote my comment to emphasize the other side of the coin, not
to fill some gap that wasn't covered in the article. It must be kind of
mistake here (I've read the posting guidelines but I'm still a newbie, thus
more prone to errors), so I propose to finish the discussion.

