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An unfinished symphony

The GPL isn't to the taste of everyone, and won't be appropriate to every project, or to every section of code. There are many other licenses, most of which have a more permissive relationship with the code. With these licences third parties can take the code, repackage and (in some cases) re-licence it, and pass it on in any form they wish without any obligation to feed code changes back to the community. This has some benefits and many drawbacks, the greatest of which is that the code of contributors can be exploited, sometimes without meaningful attribution or feedback, and code is subsequently forked - as was exemplified by IBM's strange decision to include a three-year old version of OpenOffice, 1.1.4, which was the last release to be dual-licensed by Sun, in the body of Lotus Symphony.

Even those companies that are friendly to "open source" can be tempted to prefer the short term benefit of permissively licensed code. Although the proprietary code can be marketed uniquely as an IBM product, and the extensions don't have to be released back to the community, Lotus Symphony can't easily take advantage of later enhancements to OpenOffice.org. The market, Raymond's exit route, too often defers to short term self interest.

Some developers consider more permissive licensing to belong to a better definition of freedom - the user is allowed to do anything he or she wishes with the code, without any real restriction. It is noticeable, however, that copyleft code projects have tended to be more successful in building developer communities, gaining traction and encouraging corporate participation, and the corporates seem to agree. Marc Fleury claimed that Sun's decision to release Java under the GPL "will extend the life of Java by at least fifteen years," and companies whose major business is in dealing with free software, such as JBoss, MySQL, and even Red Hat, have become highly desirable and valuable properties.

Not fade away

Ultimately, the choice of a license belongs to a project and the individual developer. The GPL does have some limitations - it is based on US copyright law and is Anglo-centric, which is why, for instance, the European Union Public License (EUPL) was created, as a GPL-compatible license which is available in the 22 languages of the European Union.

The GPL was not created with the intention of encouraging the participation of business in the development of free software, but like the widely perceived notion that "open source" distributed software development produces better software, its beneficial relationship with business was an accidental side effect of the license.

The beauty of the GPL, as any accomplished software developer will recognize, is that like a piece of elegantly written code, it has a simplicity and transparency all of its own. The license fulfils its demanding objective, of protecting and promoting the principles of free software, without ambiguity or compromise, and as such, is unlikely to fade away.

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