> >If Linux were BSD there would be no suit, simply because there would
> >be no competition.
>
> I agree wholeheartedly with this point. And there wouldn’t be thousands
> of volunteers if they thought they were providing free labor for
> others, particularly development houses that then released products
> only for the Windows platform. Fortunately, we’re not in that
> dimension.

I hadn’t thought of that. That might be part of the reason why the GPL-based projects are so much larger than the BSD-based projects.

via license-discuss@opensource.org

Update: Zak has commented on the “If Linux were BSD” thesis. He pointed out that there are many non-GPL projects just as “big” as well known GPL projects. This is a remarkable note by Zak, considering that he works at MySQL AB, whose Database is GPLed and itself one of the “big” FOSS projects.

These kinds of discussions remind me of ideologic discussions during the cold war: is capitalism better then communism? Today, now that the cold war is over, we realize that beyond the east/west antagonism, many problems have been hidden specific to a single country or area.

Ideologic discussions that try to create a linkage between how “big” a FOSS project is and the license it adopted, tend to move our attention away from the real problems the FOSS community has.