Blaming lawyers for our troubles is short-sighted. The number of opportunities in law is actually going down, and the typical advice for people who want to go to law school these days is don't bother. That doesn't sound like some dystopian future world where lawyers would be in high demand suing each other into oblivion.

If your anger should be directed somewhere, it should be directed at the wealthiest 10% of america, who own 72% of it's wealth. Which would be fine (after all, there's nothing inherently wrong with being rich), except they also don't pay their fair share of taxes either, which means cutbacks in education, social services, and so on. They will use their considerable political influence to continue that things continue the way they are, and of course, they've managed to drill into people's heads that more taxes == evil, so you have people frothing at the mouth and protesting against their own best interest.

Beautifully put.

If I sell software with anything like a typical commercial license and I decide to stop supporting it, you're SOL. With the GPL, at least you have the source and can spend money to hire someone to support it.

The GPL emphasizes code freedom over developer freedom. Take a look at Question 6 of the Commercial License page for MySQL:

Q6: What is Sun's commercial license for MySQL software?
A: Sun offers a commercial license for all of its MySQL software that is embedded in or bundled with another application. The commercial license allows OEMs, ISVs and VARs to distribute commercial binaries of MySQL software with their own commercial software without subjecting that software to the GPL and its requirement to distribute source code.

Emphasis mine. If MySQL had been BSD licensed, Monty Program AB could continue to offer a similar service for MariaDB, even though it was not the primary copyright holder of MySQL's codebase. Of course, said commercial software would have to have the BSD license included somewhere in their documentation, per the BSD license's second clause, but this is likely to be far more agreeable than the GPL's onerous requirements.

As far as the trademark is concerned, if I own BobSQL, you can't call your own database BobSQL regardless of how either one is licensed.

You are precisely correct. However, I feel that too many GPL advocates don't think about the ramifications of having to discard the brand associated with the code. "Oh we'll fork it and everything will be fine" is naive, since you now have to "get the word out" about the forked project all over again. And this is only if the copyright holders have abandoned the project, if they continue to develop it, you are now effectively competing against your old established codebase and have more to prove.

Looking back over my original post, however, it does look like I put the branding issues and the 'commercial closed source' issue under the same umbrella, though I meant differently (see: singular use of the word "disadvantage") My apologies.

...except that if Oracle owns the copyrights to MySQL, they can close source future versions of MySQL and/or let mainline development languish. I don't know if they also own the name "MySQL" but if they do they can forbid any forks of MySQL from being called "MySQL" as well.

Of course, the existing source will live forever, but any forks will not have the advantage of the "MySQL" brand name or the ability to dual-license the code for situations where more restrictive licensing might be desired by their customers.

It's kind of surprising how few people realize this disadvantage of the GPL. Keep that in mind the next time you use it on a project.

Lots of people like sex. Very few people like to be raped. The difference is in the consent. Same situation here.

Do you ever wonder why there are so few women in the Open Source world?

By all means, let the tomboy developers enjoy working on their thing, and let everyone who likes it use it, but I could think about a couple of things I'd like those 40MBs used for other than Mono

Open up a shell and type in: $ man mt

It's a victory for great free software applications that just so happen to use Mono. Mono often gets treated as a second class citizen because of its Microsoft roots, with zealots not wanting Microsoft's "unholy embrace" on Linux, whatever that's supposed to mean. Thankfully, there are sane people to defend it and because of this developers don't have to worry about their software not being included in a default install because they just so happened to pick Mono.

Also, how was my original post Flamebait?

This is a victory for Free Software advocates over Free Software zealots. Congrats to the debian team for doing the right thing, even if it might be unpopular with the crazies.

An excellent question! I think that's a great idea. However, developers of expensive proprietary software...

Who says the killer app has to come from a developer of expensive proprietary software? Apache certainly didn't.

The FDA, being the State, is of course blameless.

I know you love shoe-horning in "capitalism good government bad" bullshit in every single one of your posts, but I'm curious as to what exactly the FDA did in your hypothetical situation that you imply was worthy of blame?

You're thinking about this the wrong way. Forget running Windows apps, why not have killer apps that are native to Linux and people would switch just to run, other stuff be damned.

It's been done before, (why else do you think linux servers are so popular?) but it's about time the Linux desktop had its own killer app.

Now we can play utterly boring games on other platforms. I can hardly wait.

2/10

Considering the fact that the team size is around 10 or so at this point, and it is one programmer with no other responsibilities while the rest of the team multitasks, I say yes.