[copyleft-next] HBR cure 2013-02-18

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Tue Feb 19 04:20:19 UTC 2013


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 07:48:16PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> An interesting question and I will continue to pursue it, as off-topic
> as it might be. I always thought of Red Hat an accidental advocate of
> GPL. That is, it built a business around this hot new thing Linux, and
> Linux happened to be GPL, so it had no choice but to cope with it. My
> decidedly anecdotal observation is that it's generally really hard for
> a company (and people, for that matter) to truly cede control if they
> can find any way to avoid it. Who are the successful companies who use
> a true open source, copyleft model (not open core, not dual-licensed)
> and also own most of the code? So your observation sounds right to me.

Companies will be willing to cede control if it is in their interest
to do so.  There have been a number examples of this under a
BSD/MIT/Apache-style license, where a company has taken previously
proprietary code, released under an Open Source license, and then
continued to develop it.  

It's probably harder to find examples where this has been done under a
copyleft license, but companies can and have ceded control under a
more general Open Source set of licenses.  The reasons why in many of
these cases companies like IBM, Google, Intel, among others, have
chosen an Apache or BSD or MIT style license instead of a copyleft
style license are certainly things we could discuss if there is
interest, but I don't think "companies are scared of ceding control"
is a sufficient explanation.

Regards,

					- Ted


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