Where freedoms of developers and users conflict, GPL sides with users.
In other words, GPL only takes away your freedom to take freedom away from others. If you don't intend to restrict others' freedoms, GPL shouldn't get in your way.
As such, the GPL is always, in the "now", a license which grants less freedom than, say, the BSD or MIT licenses. Most objections to the GPL, including my own, come from a position of cost/benefit on the trade it wants to make, and of disagreeing that that trade is worth making.
How so? As far as I know, if I have GPL code, I can do whatever I want with it. Could you tell me any action I might want to take that the GPL prevents?
The only "freedom" the GPL removes is the freedom to restrict the actions of others. To me, that seems like a rather odd sort of freedom.
All it does is prevents you from redistributing the resulting binary under a license that could result in the user's freedom being restricted. I.e., the only thing that is prevented is (BSD, GPL) -> BSD, since the next step might be BSD -> Proprietary.
The way I see it GPL values freedom over short-term gains.
You can put BSD software in the AppStore, which is nice short term, but long-term that's helping platform that is a golden cage.
Wouldn't it be nice if Android was GPL v3? Instead of giving operators freedom to lock down handsets and add uninstallable crapware, give users freedom to customize and upgrade their phones. Of course, GPL-Android could have hard time gaining traction in the market because of GPL being unappealing to crapware-installing operators, but if it did succeed, that would be significant long-term win for users' freedom.
Not necessarily. WebOS is/was closer to a Linux/GPL distribution than any other smartphone and look what happened to them.
>You can put BSD software in the AppStore, which is nice short term,
It's also nice long-term as the code maintainers don't have to make decisions based on the risk of getting sued, as they would with GPL-based code.
>but long-term that's helping platform that is a golden cage.
Golden cage? How do you figure?
Edit: I'm personally glad they went with the MIT license. Also, even if a fork takes place, the original code is still available.
jQuery changed the face of client side development, and its MIT license has encouraged significant and substantial corporate participation, but I have never even heard of a jquery fork. They actually have MS offering paid support for their library.
Rails changed the face of server side programming, and its MIT license has only increased corporate participation. Where is the rails fork?
Node.js changed the face of the app server landscape and is probably the latest big thing in web development. MIT license, where are the forks?
It is definitely a theoretical possibility, but it just doesn't seem to ever happen in this world. What does happen is you gain the ability to have companies throw money/manpower behind your project that they would otherwise have spent building a competing product that they could actually use.
I think this is a point many fail to consider. BSD and GPL are, in many ways, synergistic. Having libraries available in both is the best ecosystem for both devs and end-users, IMO.