From a recent mailing list thread "When gcc43 is expected to be in base?":
[...] Nor is there anything wrong with the GPLv3 license-- it's well-crafted and handles certain technical issues resulting from varied legal systems quite well compared to most other licenses (eg, clause 17 for many European jurisdictions which do not permit one to completely disclaim liability), *provided* one is working on completely open systems.
However, anyone who needs to do things with cryptography and signing is going to find GPLv3 clauses 3 and 6 unworkable. FreeBSD (and NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc) are attractive for people building embedded systems because they are (mostly) not GPL(v2)-encumbered, and adopting GPLv3 code would make that problem worse.
It's a shame so many people are switching to GPLv3 because it's going to make commercial software development harder. I know one of the things I like about VxWorks is that it has many BSD commands - after being told many times by colleagues that "VxWorks isn't UNIX" (when I complained that "ls" didn't work) I found they'd basically lifted the FreeBSD 6 network stack and dumped it into their product. Finding that was quite wonderful.
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Date: 2008-08-18 01:19 pm (UTC)[...]
Nor is there anything wrong with the GPLv3 license-- it's well-crafted
and handles certain technical issues resulting from varied legal
systems quite well compared to most other licenses (eg, clause 17 for
many European jurisdictions which do not permit one to completely
disclaim liability), *provided* one is working on completely open
systems.
However, anyone who needs to do things with cryptography and signing
is going to find GPLv3 clauses 3 and 6 unworkable. FreeBSD (and
NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc) are attractive for people building embedded
systems because they are (mostly) not GPL(v2)-encumbered, and adopting
GPLv3 code would make that problem worse.
Also http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/bsd-guru/the-freebsd-foundation-on-gpl3-18770 and http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html
It's a shame so many people are switching to GPLv3 because it's going to make commercial software development harder. I know one of the things I like about VxWorks is that it has many BSD commands - after being told many times by colleagues that "VxWorks isn't UNIX" (when I complained that "ls" didn't work) I found they'd basically lifted the FreeBSD 6 network stack and dumped it into their product. Finding that was quite wonderful.