I often read Matt Assay’s “Open Road”. For the most part I like reading his take on the open source world, but every now and then he posts something that makes me feel like I am researching lesser known connections of some political organization. Really, I didn’t know the Heritage Foundation was connected to Chechnyan Rebels. But wait, aren’t they leading the war on terror?
Recently, he posted a comment about the the differences between the Apache licensing and the GPL (here). I followed one of the links to a blog post from a guy named Benjamin Black (here), notice the title. Both are positing that the Apache license is better than the GPL because it allows more freedom and does not infect your code like a virus, which is generally true, though I am not convinced that this is worse than total freedom. They posit that this can lead to abuse.
Benjamin Black gives two examples of people abusing the GPL. His first example may have some merit (here). It looks like they are dual licensing it, which means they can choose who gets freedom to do different things. The second example is of from Zed Shaw who wrote Mongrel which is a web server that, I believe, is popular among Ruby programmers, though I have never used myself. Zed explains that if he doesn’t GPL than other people and companies can abuse him, which he explains here (here). I think Zed makes a fairly strong, if emotionally connected, points and I feel quite similar to him when I am coding myself.
Either way, I am glad we have the choice between all of these different licenses, but I think I will stick with the GPL for now. The debate rages on, which side are you on?