Mike,
...and people wonder why open-source hasn't taken a greater hold in
business...
Is this serious?! Or is it a joke?
Do you genuinely believe that proprietary ("closed-source") licenses are
easier to understand than then open ones?! Indeed, just about every
software company has their own license, requiring someone to understand
something entirely new with each stinkin' software package.
And who is it, exactly, that wonders why open-source hasn't taken a
greater hold on business? I don't know of any business anywhere that's
not using open source to one degree or another. Not a single one!
Indeed, it'd be very difficult to run a business that's NOT impacted by
open source!
Our environment, the IBM i community, is probably the most
ultra-conservative environment in computers today. Yet even so -- what
do we use for a web server? Apache! An open source web server. Tomcat
is also open source, and also popular. PHP is an open source language,
entirely designed and written by an open source community, and has been
taking our community by storm. What do we use to edit source code?
RDi/WDSC which is based on (drumroll please) ECLIPSE! Another open
source tool. And that's in the ultra-conservative IBM i community... in
the PC and Mac communities, open source is nearing 40% of the software
used today, a huge percentage. And in the Unix community, open source
is the norm, more popular than anything else.
I agree that the GPL is overblown and overcomplicated, and with the
primary goal of being viral. They want everyone to use the GPL, so they
try to make it so that everyone who uses their tools must also use the
GPL... and it spreads like a virus...
But GPL isn't your only choice in open source.
midrange.com
