I was a sysadmin, mobile dev. expert, Nintendo DS game programmer, Pascal compiler dev., Java consultant, assembler guru, automated QA engineer, embedded C/C++ maintainer. Some say I'm a hacker.
While I definitely like the idea behind the GPL, I'd advise everyone to take extra care, which version of the license they chose. GPLv3 has some very over-reaching implications, which makes it difficult for companies to endorse. No wonder Apple went their own way to basically remove every component from macOS, where upstream switched the license to GPLv3. They were fine with GPLv2. Linus Torvalds has a great breakdown on this, and why he embraced GPLv2 only for the Linux kernel.
Also the SaaS economy made it painfully unclear, who is the user of the software, who has rights to the source, and what kind of other rights they have. If a backend component uses a GPL piece of software, the end use who uses it via an API and a frontend, might not have rights to the source for it anyway. Even worse if it's behind a reverse proxy like nginx. So this might not help people building GPL software on the backend.
I mostly use GPL 2 and usually with the classpath exception which is more lenient. I like a lot of the ideas behind GPL 3 and it uses language that makes more sense to lawyers (so has better potential standing in court). GPL 2 is already in organizations everywhere thanks to Linux so we can "prove" it's OK with pretty much any org.
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While I definitely like the idea behind the GPL, I'd advise everyone to take extra care, which version of the license they chose. GPLv3 has some very over-reaching implications, which makes it difficult for companies to endorse. No wonder Apple went their own way to basically remove every component from macOS, where upstream switched the license to GPLv3. They were fine with GPLv2. Linus Torvalds has a great breakdown on this, and why he embraced GPLv2 only for the Linux kernel.
Also the SaaS economy made it painfully unclear, who is the user of the software, who has rights to the source, and what kind of other rights they have. If a backend component uses a GPL piece of software, the end use who uses it via an API and a frontend, might not have rights to the source for it anyway. Even worse if it's behind a reverse proxy like nginx. So this might not help people building GPL software on the backend.
Yes.
I mostly use GPL 2 and usually with the classpath exception which is more lenient. I like a lot of the ideas behind GPL 3 and it uses language that makes more sense to lawyers (so has better potential standing in court). GPL 2 is already in organizations everywhere thanks to Linux so we can "prove" it's OK with pretty much any org.