Sorry to eavesdrop on your conversation, and intrude uninvited, but I smelled whiffs of "copyright is wrong -> GPL uses copyright -> GPL is wrong", and I would like to remind you that the way GPL uses it is - to troll the system, to twist and turn copyright around to make it destroy itself. And it is upfront about it, it doesn't try to pretend that copyright is good. There is no reason to not use it as a tool to achieve your goals today, in practise. Once you achieved the no copyright utopia, GPL will just be harmlessly deprecated.
@mewmew For the purposes of this you can assume the most vicious type of GPL.
You are avoiding my question... and basically saying "everyone does this therefore it's right".
Also I never seen of a project that adopted GPL(understanding the point, not by mistake or misunderstanding) drop GPL.
There are TONS of major projects developed en-masse that were forced to drop GPL due to its viral nature and has seen been replaced by a permissive licensed alternative, usually consisting of a large portion of th original developers. But of course due to the viral nature of hte GPL they were forced to rewrite their own code from scratch and waste time.
I'm suprised with it being so common you never heard of it, you must be a bit out of touch with the community. The move from X11 to xorg years back was specifically to drop the GPL license for example.
Yes your correct it was from XFree, my mistake. And no its not a lie what you just said is 100% what I said
"because xfree86 was incompatible with the GPLv2,"
Yea because of its VIRAL nature it wasnt compatible with permissive licenses.
Yes the XOrg foundation after that made a strict policy that all their software must use permissive licenses and copyleft (like the GPL) licenses would no longer be permitted. Now XOrg is no longer GPL in any of its core tools.
@kick XFree used to be a mix of GPL components and BSD like components, the virality of the GPL became an issue, at one point they tried to modify the BSD components to make them compatible with the GPL however there were still concerns about the compatibility and now the XOrg foundation policy is to completely reject GPL components from its distribution and ensure none of the code they distribute contains GPL components anymore. You can no longer contribute your own code to the distribution releases if it contains GPL licensing structure.