A Permissive Bubble?

[ Thanks to Grigor Gatchev for this
link. ]

“I remembered this after reading two articles by Matthew Aslett
– ‘On the continuing decline on the GPL’ and ‘The future of
commercial open source business strategies’. The data this research
is based on appears to me mostly correct, and I couldn’t find fatal
logic flaws in them. However, my logic still couldn’t agree with
some of the conclusions, and tended to see other in a different
light. Something have to be wrong here.

“The data shows that, while both the copyleft-licensed and the
permissively licensed projects grow in numbers during the last year
and a half, the number of the permissively licensed projects grows
far faster that that of the copyleft licenses, especially among the
commercial vendors. The analyses concludes that the vendors start
realizing that the open source is here to stay, and they start to
use business models that include collaborating on an open source
product and differentiating on (and profiting from) another stage
in the software stack. Driven by the desire to be able to use the
open source code without being forced to contribute back their own
code, the businesses tend to support open-source projects that are
permissively licensed (or to license permissively the projects they
open-source).

“These conclusions say that the businesses have started valuing
the open source, and see it as an important asset and a way to make
money. I would be very happy if this could convince me. However, it
doesn’t.”

Complete
Story