…by David A. Wheeler. In his blog:
“If your goal is to have a useful program that stays useful long-term, then a protective (“copylefting”) license like the LGPL or GPL licenses has much to offer. Protective licenses force the cooperation that is good for everyone in the long term, if a long-term useful project is the goal. For example, I’ve noticed that GPL projects are far less likely to fork than BSD-licensed projects; the GPL completely eliminates any financial advantage to forking. The power of the GPL license is so strong that even if you choose to not use a copylefting license, it is critically important that an open source software project use a GPL-compatible license” (GPL, BSD, and NetBSD – why the GPL rocketed Linux to success, about Charles M. Hannum’s letter aboutNetBSD future)
In his web:
“There are several basic problems with software patents, compared to actual innovation:
- almost all truly important innovations in software were never covered by patents, so using patents as a primary source would omit almost all of the most important software innovations;
- as software patentability has increased, the number of software innovations has decreased; and
- software patents are often granted to cover ideas that are obvious to practitioners of the art or have prior art (even though these aren’t supposed to be patented).”
(The most important sofware innovations)
(Thanks to bille)