Recently, during FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre), in Brazil, Eric Raymond defended open source model of development and quoted: “Basically, we don’t need GPL. It’s based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license“.
Eric Raymond talks about GPL and BSD licenses
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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He is a GNU fundie that will lie himself to objectivity.
anun he moos is a know FSF troll
I didn’t know ESR spoke Portuguese!
It’s all about the benjamins!
You guys are right about us BSD developers. We do have a secret agenda. We do want to destroy freedom. We do worship the devil and eat kittens for breakfast.
The truth is that only the GPL can save the world from Bush and the Evil Red States. Halleluhah! All praise Stallman and pass the collection plate!
if BSD is so superior then I call on all the BSDers to stop using GPL products, walk the walk please…. dont support us GPL commies
“BSD is a much better license. Much more code can be reused between projects without restriction and much less duplication of effort will take place. ”
LESS, what? So if M$ takes productX and then builds it into productXY and then Cisco decides they want a productXY they have to start BACK at productX AGAIN… oops, SUN also needs product XYZ oh, too bad they have to start back at productX
in the GPL world, debian makes productX, suse takes productX and turns it into productXY, WOW look now debian gets a productXY without doing anything more than making productX, now redhat want to make productXYZ hey look they can start at productXY !!! NO DUPLICATION!
The only way you can can claim that BSD allows more code reuse is for the case of propriatary products, therby supporting propriatary products, large corporations, monopolies… closed code!!!!
If everyoneeverything was GPL then we would all have equal footing, standing, and with no duplication and complete code reuse…
Quote: “GPL is perfect example of how to kill a healthy industry.”
No. Greedy corporations and software patents are. Not to mention governments that put business ahead of the rights of the people. The very people who have the legal right to vote (businesses are not individuals and do not have rights to vote, and rightly so).
People are complaining that you can’t make changes/improvements to the GPL and sell them, yes you can. Go and grok the GPL properly.
People are complaining that you can’t sell GPL software. Rubbish – you can. Again, go read and grok the GPL properly. The GPL is only necessary because of greedy corporations who raid and pillage from the ‘free software’ without appreciation or returning to others for their efforts.
For all those bitching about the GPL – how about your government takes away award wages, or minimum pay rates etc. Let the employers pay you what they want (ie their return for your efforts of work). How many employers will reduce their wages because they “can” in that instance? If employers can do that, they’d pay you bugger all, cos they can (Australia is about to have legislation introduced that allows just this). The BSD is similar to the above analogy, there’s no guarantee in the license that makes someone who takes BSDL software that they have to re-contribute back improvements to the community on which they’ve based their works. The GPL enforces this. You want to use the community’s work, then you have to abide by the community’s laws and re-contribute back.
As I said in my earlier post, if you don’t like the GPL then don’t develop software and release it under the GPL.
For those that fail to see other related issues, imagine if the Linux kernel was released under the BSD. What would SCO be doing then? The GPL has kept those bastards honest. Would the BSD have? I doubt it very much.
Dave
redhat makes money and the coolest thing is they make me money, my 7 dollar stick is now about a 13dollar stock…
seems ok to me!
i would bet mandrake is back to profitability since they are buying stuff up…
novell has never been able to run a business, good tech guys but horrible business so I have no idea about suse/novell
debian is just fine too
David Pastern: The BSD is similar to the above analogy, there’s no guarantee in the license that makes someone who takes BSDL software that they have to re-contribute back improvements to the community on which they’ve based their works. The GPL enforces this. You want to use the community’s work, then you have to abide by the community’s laws and re-contribute back.
Actually… This is well known to be false (even a lot of GPL advocates will state that this is false when it is to their benefit to do so).
You need not return the source code to the community.
For one thing, if you do not distribute your changes then you need not supply source to anyone at all. If you do distribute changes, then you only need to supply the source to those who got the changes. (Meaning if you have only one customer, they are the only ones with rights to the source code)
Secondly… The source code need not be in a “usable” form. It is quite possible, that you may not be able to easily compile it. It does not even need to be easily understandable. (For example, I could use special tools to develop a program. There is nothing that states I need to give you my tools. Even if it did, special training may be required to use those tools.)
The truth is… The GPL doesn’t really give the community as much as people often proclaim.
What the GPL primarily “torpedos” is the part of the closed source software industry that focuses on making money from the “little people”.
“GPL is perfect example of how to kill a healthy industry.”
Healthy? Healthy, is that what you call the stagnation in technology we had been in and are just now coming out of thanks to competition and innovation, in other words thanks to linux… we see the tech industry picking back up and things taking off again….
“For one thing, if you do not distribute your changes then you need not supply source to anyone at all.”
yes which only means IN HOUSE use, while you may gain a competitive edge as I have pointed out, this only applies to IN-HOUSE use and still nothing stops your competition from taking the same product you started with and building something the same if not better than yours…
” If you do distribute changes, then you only need to supply the source to those who got the changes. (Meaning if you have only one customer, they are the only ones with rights to the source code) ”
WRONG! basically everyone in a round about way has the right to it once it is distributed not just the customer….
john: yes which only means IN HOUSE use, while you may gain a competitive edge as I have pointed out, this only applies to IN-HOUSE use and still nothing stops your competition from taking the same product you started with and building something the same if not better than yours…
Of course it only means in-house use. Second my point was that there is no requirement to return anything to the community. In fact, many people point out how most development is in-house.
So I don’t see how your statement really counters mine. BTW… Your statement also applies to the BSD. Someone else can always pick up the code from where it was last given to the public. (In fact, for alot of people there is “no direct difference” between the GPL and the BSD licenses. The only real difference for these people is in the “side effects”.)
john: WRONG! basically everyone in a round about way has the right to it once it is distributed not just the customer….
As has been often times been stated by GPL supporters, only the people who have had the software distributed to them have a right to the source code, your customer(s) is/are not guarenteed to distribute the software themselves, and since they are (usually) not in the business of creating and distributing software why would they? And even if they do they may just give it to one other party. At that rate it’d take “forever” before it ends up in the hands of the general community.
(The point being… There is no guarentee one way or the other as to whether the software will ever end up in the hands of the general public. It might, but then again it might not.)
So my question to you is, “How?” How is it that say… You have a right to my source code… If I say… Give a compiled copy to one of my friends or relatives? (Let’s say it’s under the GPL)
(Of course… My friend/relative could make another program based on that and distribute it to someone else. But… Most people I know can at best write “Hello World!” so I’m not too worried about that. So that’s a “special case” scenario.)
Oh yes… They could hire someone else to work on the source code for them and so that other person could get the source. But there’s no guarentee what that person will do with it either.
a lot of open source is operating systems and/or operating system tools, so the only reason you would modify it WOULD BE to distribute it…. do you really think a lot of companies etc modify GPL products and use them in-house only?
actually you could have a point about the in-house thing, never thought about how much was ONLY USED in-house. I wish there was some way to know….
and yes, bsd is just as good in this respect…. but as we all know M$ is in the OS business and they can grab BSD code and pad their own pockets…so thats evil
eeeevvvviiiiillll
If you have received productXYZ that is covered under the GPL and give it to me then I have the same rights as you, which means I can request source code. If I sneak into your office, steal the cd with the GPL covered program on it and make copies for everyone then I and all my friends also have the right to request the source. In fact, I can just lie and say “yea i received a copy of this gpl covered product and I would like the source code” so as I said basically once it is distributed then for all intents and purposes anyone has the right to request source code….
So if they give me a copy of that program all rights pass on to me…
Or if necessaryI would just say that a friend of mine stole a copy from your relative and then made a copy for me and I would like to request the source code please…
of course i also wonder if the gpl3 will close up the in-house clause completely!!
(This is my last post. I have some business to attend to. Though I will come back to check responses at some point out of curiosity)
john: If you have received productXYZ that is covered under the GPL and give it to me then I have the same rights as you.
Nope. Dual Licensing.
What am I refering to? I have the right to redistribute my code (and only my code, so this doesn’t include any code I happen to use) under any license I so choose as long as it’s compatible with the software its combined with. (Assuming it needs to be combined with anything.) You do not have that right. If you use my GPL’d code, then it is only under the GPL for you.
john: If I sneak into your office, steal the cd with the GPL covered program on it and make copies for everyone then I and all my friends also have the right to request the source.
Nope. Breaking and entering. Theft.
What do I mean? I never gave you the code. You (literally) stole the code. You’d be a criminal and as a result the license would not apply to you. If you contacted me for the source, I could elect to send the police to your door instead.
In fact… It would be easy enough to determine that you’re a criminal. If I never distributed it at all, then I should be the only person that has it, contacting me would be an admission of your guilt. If I did distribute it to a friend/relative (like in my example), I could simply ask them if they distributed it. If they say no, guess what? Problem. Granted it would be your word against their’s, but that would just be the start of the evidence. The results would hinge on what other evidence we could acquire.
Also… Unless I’m mistaken… (Please correct me if I’m wrong) It’s actually the distributor who takes responsibility for giving you the source code. Meaning, it is technically my responsibility to supply it to my customer. And it is my customer’s responsibility to give you the source code since they would have distributed the program to you. (According to you anyway. You technically would have stolen it. So they didn’t really distribute it to you) So… If you contacted me… I could simply say… “I didn’t distribute the program to you. Contact your distributor.” And when you contact my customer, he/she would say, “What the heck are you talking about? I didn’t distribute anything to anyone!”
(On a side note… It seems to me like this would be like stealing my car, getting in a wreck because there was something wrong with the car and then expecting me (or my insurance) to cover your medical expenses. Not a perfect analogy of course. But I think it gets across the point.)
Thank you for bringing a bit of sanity in this discussion.
The double-licensing aspect is actually quite important – this is how you can release your code under the GPL and still make money off of it. You can do like Trolltech did with Qt and release it under different licenses depending on the intended use.
“Nope. Dual Licensing.
What am I refering to? I have the right to redistribute my code (and only my code, so this doesn’t include any code I happen to use) under any license I so choose as long as it’s compatible with the software its combined with. (Assuming it needs to be combined with anything.) You do not have that right. If you use my GPL’d code, then it is only under the GPL for you.”
i didnt say i used your code I said YOU received a GPL cover product, you made me a copy, when you gave me that copy then I received the same rights as you which means YES I have a right to the source. But i am confused at what you are saying toward the end there! If you have GPL’d your code then it is ALWAYS under the GPL. A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program must be released under the GPL if it is released at all. But I may be off track as to what you are saying…it is late here after all
“Meaning, it is technically my responsibility to supply it to my customer. And it is my customer’s responsibility to give you the source code since they would have distributed the program to you.”
Whoever wrote/modified the code has the responsibility to distribute the source. I may receive a GPL covered product and may not even bother getting the source since I do not want it, I then make a copy and pass it on to a friend who DOES want the source, how would I give it to them?
“If I never distributed it at all”
But you asked specifically if you DID distribute it and I specifically said YOU received a GPL covered program and made a copy which implies that it was a distributed product covered under the GPL. And YES you can come and get me for stealing but it still doesnt alter my rights uner the GPL. You distributed a program that is covered under the GPL, i stole a copy, i was given a copy, however doesnt matter, I have the GPL protections. Now if you NEVER distributed it then I may be up the creek but then again if you didnt distribute it then could it really be considered to be licensed under the GPL.
“If I did distribute it to a friend/relative (like in my example), I could simply ask them if they distributed it”
maybe they left the disk at school one day and I seen it and had to check what it was so I could return it, I then seen the GPL license in there and realized it was distributed so I snagged a copy….
maybe their 10 year old was trying to figure out nero and made a copy… who knows
from the GPL FAQ:
” If someone steals a CD containing a version of a GPL-covered program, does the GPL give him the right to redistribute that version?
If the version has been released elsewhere, then the thief probably does have the right to make copies and redistribute them under the GPL, but if he is imprisoned for stealing the CD he may have to wait until his release before doing so. ”
and
“My friend got a GPL-covered binary with an offer to supply source, and made a copy for me. Can I use the offer myself to obtain the source?
Yes, you can. The offer must be open to everyone who has a copy of the binary that it accompanies. This is why the GPL says your friend must give you a copy of the offer along with a copy of the binary—so you can take advantage of it.”
Quote: “Actually… This is well known to be false (even a lot of GPL advocates will state that this is false when it is to their benefit to do so).”
OK, i’ll correct my original post.
If you make modifications to GPL’d software and sell or distribute it, then you MUST return the changes to the community, and offer source code if asked (you can charge for the media that the src code is stored on etc).
If you make modifications to GPL’d software and only use them internally, then you do NOT need to provide the changes to the src code etc.
What is so hard about this? What is so bad for business about this? The GPL isn’t stopping you from using GPL in your business. Or improving it for your business. What’s so “communist” about this approach?
Of course, if you want to freeload off others and try and make money…that’s when you’ll have issues with the GPL. That’s where the BSD let’s you get away with things. I like businesses etc contributing improvements back to the community. That’s a true community. Allowing people to take but not contribute back is not a true community imho.
Dave
the copyright holder for a program can release it under several different licenses in parallel, but i(not copyright holder) cannot take a gpl covered work, tweak it a bit and release it under something else….
right, so if YOU are copyright holder then you can release under anything you want, but if it is released under the GPL then I have all the rights the GPL gives me
i think i see what you are saying…. YAWN
“If you make modifications to GPL’d software and sell or distribute it, then you MUST return the changes to the community, and offer source code if asked (you can charge for the media that the src code is stored on etc).”
wouldnt the source code BE the changes, that is all someone needs to provide if they are distributing binarys
I have the same gripe about BSDL, but I have no problem with anyone choosing the BSDL, but I do have a problem when people spew crud about how BSDL is superior in some way… I dont think it is simply because it can be taken advantage of WAY too much! If at least any company that used BSD code in a propriatary product was forced to pay royalties or a chunk of change or in SOME way give back I would feel a lot better about it. Think about it, if everything we know of as linux was under the BSDL then M$ would already have a new OS to hand out to everyone, heck it could even be a one man show at M$ since it is all done they just have to wrap it up and sell it… And we all know they would!
I will be taking the GPL side in this debate but first I would like to show why we even have to have FOSS Licenses of any kind to begin with.
Once opon a time Intellectual monopoly grants (Copyrights and patents) were NOT PROPERTY. They were Constitutional Contracts that expired in a timely manner after which the invention or work in question went into the Public Domain. This ment the text, musical note arrangement or bluprints for the work or discovery in question were released to the general public without any further copyright or patent restrictions on it. Other authors composers and inventers could then modify, update and improve the parts of this public domain material that they wished to into new copyrightable and patentable inventions or works that themselves would enter the public domain in a timely manner.
Open Source Licensing was not needed under this original concept of copyright and patent becaues all “proprietary” works and inventions eventually became “open source” BY LAW through copyright and patent expiration and the public domain. Someone deliberately putting his works or discoveries into the public domain without applying for copyright or patent in the first place was the closest thing to what we think of as Open Source today under this type of system.
However with the concept of Copyright becoming perminant “Intellectual Property” and corporations being able to apply for them as “persons” that began in the middle 20th century people who wanted to give their works and inventions
to the public domain had to find a way to protect them from
corporations who would steal the new public domain material and us it as the basis for their own perminant “Intellectual property”. Under this type of a system using the perminant
“Intellectual Property” copyright system against itself through licenses like the GPL became an absolute necessity to make sure that material intended by its authors for the general public STAYS PUBLIC.
A lot of people here who support BSD and Mit style licensing
talk about the “poor health” of the open source software industry because of the GPL. However have these people ever looked at the current health of the PROPRIETARY software industry? (With the exception of shareware GAMES which is the only proprietary software catagory that is showing any health and vigor these days.)
Operating Systems. (With the death of the proprietary OS/2 and BeOS and the Open Sourcing of Solaris there is now ONLY ONE proprietary operating system currently in production, Microsoft Windows XP.)
Office Suites (Corel’s, Word Perfect is virtually peripheral
and Corel itself was forced to become a private company rather than a public corporation due to lack of sales. The ONLY proprietary office suite in widespread use is Microsoft Office.)
Software Development Environments. (In this area of proprietary software Borland is just barely hanging on by selling at ultra high prices to its few remaining loyal customers and this company’s set of UseNet groups resembles a complaint department these days rather than e healthy programming community. Watcom C/C++ has gone Open Source. Zortech C/C++ is being given away as a “free beer” closed source product now called Digital Mars. The only strong proprietary software development environment is Microsoft Visual Studio and its component parts when licensed separately.)
Graphics authoring software. (Photoshop and some shareware
products are about it for proprietary software in this area.)
Does this really look like a healthy industry to you guys?
It sure doesn’t to me.
This is why I support the GPL and LGPL as a way to keep Open Source PUBLIC and HEALTHY at least until this insane perminant “Intellectual Property” copyright and patent system that neccessitates these licenses falls which might actually be quite soon. Greedy systems ALWAYS over extend themselves and collapse under their own weight. In fact that’s what happened to the Communism that some people here claim the GPL is. ;c)
I’am very disappointed with Eric Raymond :/
In my opinion (I advocate for BSD), the problem with the GPL is that it creates an endogamic software community due to its virical behaviour (GPL zealots doesn’t like to read this) which tries to compete against closed source. Stallman says that all software should be free (and GPL, of course). Who is against BSDL or alike keep saying that “a company takes that software, modifies it and then sells it with no feedback to the comunity and that is not freedom”. We know it and we accept it because we think that free software should benefit everyone, not all but companies. We think that feedback to free software should be voluntary not imposed, that is where freedom lies. I’m thankful to whom coded the BSD TCP/IP stack used by Microsoft, imagine that it was GPL, maybe they should have designed a proprietary stack and divided the Internet by two, millions using Windows against thousands using GPL software.
The GPL is the only license that makes sure once freedom to do something is given is never taken back by anyone. Big corporations ofcource would like a BSD license so they could benefit from others work but not give anything back.
Eric Raymond is an asshole.
coral snake — smooooooth man, very smoooooth….
———-
as far as
“I’m thankful to whom coded the BSD TCP/IP stack used by Microsoft, imagine that it was GPL, maybe they should have designed a proprietary stack and divided the Internet by two, millions using Windows against thousands using GPL software.”
as far as I know they did rewrite it later… it wouldnt devide the internet by two, it would of just created two groups of users, nothing more. According to you we have that now since linux has its own tcp/ip stack and beos has its own and so forth. M$ would of been crazy to created something that didnt interoperate anyway so they figure why bother just take this code and slap it in…
So you think it would be alright if linux/gnome/kde and so forth was under the BSD and M$ did nothing but take these type projects, create a nice system and sell it left and right….
as far as I know they did rewrite it later… it wouldnt devide the internet by two, it would of just created two groups of users, nothing more. According to you we have that now since linux has its own tcp/ip stack and beos has its own and so forth. M$ would of been crazy to created something that didnt interoperate anyway so they figure why bother just take this code and slap it in…
I’m struggling to see why it is wrong for MS to use BSDL code. This form of freeloading has not hurt development of the BSD tcp/ip stack which keeps running on its own momentum. Standardization of critical core libraries sounds like a better idea to me than the need for everyone to reinvent their own clean-room implementations.
So you think it would be alright if linux/gnome/kde and so forth was under the BSD and M$ did nothing but take these type projects, create a nice system and sell it left and right….
Well, chunks of what comes with Linux are BSDL. Second, there are dozens of projects out there under non-copyleft free licenses: apache, perl, and python come to mind. And yet, there has not been much in the way of hostile forks. Network effects frequently provide strong incentives to stick close to the main fork.
“However with the concept of Copyright becoming perminant “Intellectual Property” and corporations being able to apply for them as “persons” that began in the middle 20th century people who wanted to give their works and inventions
to the public domain had to find a way to protect them from
corporations who would steal the new public domain material and us it as the basis for their own perminant “Intellectual property”. Under this type of a system using the perminant
“Intellectual Property” copyright system against itself through licenses like the GPL became an absolute necessity to make sure that material intended by its authors for the general public STAYS PUBLIC. ”
The above is simply a variation on the “lockin” argument that everyone’s been using so far. The public domain is still available. Treasure Planet was a variation on Treasure Island which is in the public domain, but the movie itself is under copyright. I could however come out with a story based on Treasure Island and as long as it was different enough from Treasure Planet. Disney couldn’t say a thing to me.
“A lot of people here who support BSD and Mit style licensing talk about the “poor health” of the open source software industry because of the GPL. However have these people ever looked at the current health of the PROPRIETARY software industry? (With the exception of shareware GAMES which is the only proprietary software catagory that is showing any health and vigor these days.) ”
Yes, and there could be more than one reason for that state of affairs. Not just IP. At least OSS isn’t SUPPOSE TO fall under those kind of non-IP reasons. e.g. thousand eyes…all bugs shallow…
oh as long as it is only small parts then bsdl isnt a problem, but on a grander scale it would be horrible…
you dont see protection of freedom as important? you think it is reasonable and alright for a corporation to take and take and take and never give back, they took your work that you sweated over and released, wouldnt it be nice if what they make from your work you had equal rights to it….
The GPL is a perfect example of a few people trying to force their will on the rest since they know their way is better. What would RMS say if someone tried to establish a religion that way? He would have made a great ayatollah, if his (essentially religious) beliefs about God and software were simply switched.
If there was any benefit (to non-hobbyists) to freeing all source code, every business would do it all the time and this whole issue (including the separate existence of the GPL and BSDL) would be moot.
Is it so hard to comprehend that someone might want to retain their rights to their work, rather than essentially assigning it to a community? Want that enough to forego a lot of neat GPL code that carries an unacceptable moral price, just like commercial code that carries an unmanageable money price?
you dont see protection of freedom as important?
Well, the problem here is that I’m not convinced that freedom is harmed when MS uses a BSD tcp/ip stack or ftp command line. There are an infinite number of copies of the free version out there, and in most cases the free branch will beat the commercial branch in innovation. This is about like arguing that the freedom to read, publish and perform Hamlet is lost because of The Lion King, Strange Brew, and Lawrence Olivier.
you think it is reasonable and alright for a corporation to take and take and take and never give back, they took your work that you sweated over and released, wouldnt it be nice if what they make from your work you had equal rights to it….
Well, I think it’s important to realize that the BSDL comes out of a academic research economy rather than a product economy. The BSDL sees code as knowledge, while the GPL sees code as product.
When I publish something as knowledge, there is always a risk that some individual or organization out there may use that knowledge for purposes that I don’t especially like or agree with. A genetic sequence has the potential to benefit companies wanting to sell more herbicides, as well as evolutionary biologists tracking populations. A map has the potential to benefit strip miners as well as ecologists. A software library can potentially benefit MS as well as amateur programmers.
The GPL makes excellent sense if you see you code as a product, and don’t want to compete with your own product in the marketplace. However, in academic reseach economies the “product” isn’t always the code, it’s the ideas embedded in the code, and data that you collect from using the code. In an academic research economy, the easy money is in creating proofs of concept that build professional reputation and land grant funding. The hard money is in trying to create a “product” that competes with other products.
So to be honest, I really don’t care if MS or anyone else uses the software I create to transform Discourse Analysis transcripts into Social Network Analysis data. I’m not paid to make software. I’m paid to say something meaningful about educational 3d chat environments. With any luck, next year I’ll be paid to examine a different set of hypotheses using these methods.
“When I publish something as knowledge, there is always a risk that some individual or organization out there may use that knowledge for purposes that I don’t especially like or agree with. A genetic sequence has the potential to benefit companies wanting to sell more herbicides, as well as evolutionary biologists tracking populations. A map has the potential to benefit strip miners as well as ecologists. A software library can potentially benefit MS as well as amateur programmers”
There’s also the “dark side” as well. How do some othe peace-loving GPLers feel when the military uses their code? IMHO I do feel the the BSD is more honest when it comes to intent, while the GPL seems to have more and more implicit “but…but…”. Of which the Apple-KHTML, and the upcoming GPL3 and web-services issue seems to be it’s manifestation.
ok, fine… make a complete OS BSDL and see where you get with your knowledge…. And if M$ pays the patent office and manages to actually sue you becuse you developed something that is similar to theirs out of the same BSDL code then I hope you enjoy your knowledge that YOU created a millionare while you were and still are a bankrupt welfare case… enjoy
ok, fine… make a complete OS BSDL and see where you get with your knowledge….
Well, actually there is a complete BSDL OS. (Two as a matter of fact.) There are a lot of good ideas embedded in FreeBSD and OpenBSD
And if M$ pays the patent office and manages to actually sue you becuse you developed something that is similar to theirs out of the same BSDL code then I hope you enjoy your knowledge that YOU created a millionare while you were and still are a bankrupt welfare case… enjoy
Well, since patents protect novel innovations and not code, the GPL doesn’t have much protection from hostile patent action. This is one of the reasons why GPL image manipulation software didn’t work with GIF for many years, (even though GPL gif libraries had been created.)
If Microsoft is using BSDL code, then the innovations contained in that code are published prior art and can’t be patented. If Micrsoft is creating a patent from new code, then neither GPL or BSDL groups would have access to that code.
I hope you enjoy your knowledge that YOU created a millionare while you were and still are a bankrupt welfare case… enjoy
That’s an example of what I’ve said. You are not with GPL because you are with free software, but because you are against the propietary software.