An excerpt: I think this sums it up. -----------
GPL is a tool that uses copyright to enforce software freedom, but… in order to be able to enforce that there must be a copyright holder that can take action. The FSF is aware of this and is carefully requiring contributors and their employers (!) to sign legal papers of copyright transfer: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/why-assign.html The problem is that most GPL projects can not afford to force potential contributors to get their employers to sign legal papers as it will reduce the number of contributions to 0 and therefore the copyright to their projects is either dispersed among the different contributors or even worse, is questionably held by a single person or entity (with emphasis on questionably). ------------- Thadeus On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 1:21 PM, VP <vtp2...@gmail.com> wrote: > I do not think that GPL is the determining factor of why Django or > Rails are popular. > > It is not clear that GPL scares off potential users. I will go out > on the limp to say that most potential users of web2py will be in the > capacity of app developers, not framework developers. They might be > scared if they don't understand it as intended, which is why some said > it needs to be clarified. Once the licensing is clear, they have > nothing to be scared about. > > As for framework developers, sure GPL is not permissive for commercial > intentions. So, if you want to branch of web2py, customizing the > framework, possibly improving it, and want to close source, then no > you can't do that with GPL. But those cases are few, and arguably > not what most potential users care about. > > > On Dec 15, 1:07 pm, pbreit <pbreitenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > It's not worthwhile fiddling around with the exception since the GPL > stigma > > will remain. > > > > It's clear that GPL scares off potential users. > > > > I come from a background of relentlessly lowering barriers to adoption. I > > would very much like to see Web2py usage go way up. >
