GPL
It seems that Microsoft in Bulgaria is collecting a bunch of disparaging quotations about the GPL.
It's interesting how ecumenical they've been about this, featuring BSD proponents who are still shunning proprietary software alongside proprietary software advocates alongside copyleft advocates who are just pointing out how copyleft works.
The biggest frustrations I found in reading this were two. The first is a matter of terminology.
Briefly: the GPL is a free software license. Free software licenses include both copyleft and non-copyleft licenses. Free software licenses are not more or less "pure" than one another (although they might be more or less political, or more or less radical).
"Open source" is intended to have the same denotation as "free software". To the extent that there is any basis for distinguishing between them, we could say that open source software is software which is licensed or distributed in accordance with the Open Source Definition and that free software is software which is distributed in a way which gives the public the "Four Freedoms" identified by FSF. Historically, these were not supposed to be distinct from one another.
It's totally incorrect and ahistorical to use "free software" to refer to copylefted software in contradistinction to "open source" used to refer to non-copylefted software, which some authors have started to do. (There are definitely political reasons why people favor one term or the other, but that does not imply that the terms refer to different kinds of software or licenses.)
The second thing which bothers me is the kind of anxiety and uncertainty about copyleft and the "viral" nature of copyleft. Proprietary software developers don't make a habit of incorporating random code written by other people without understanding the legal status of that code. If they do that, they're already in deep trouble, GPL or no GPL. Using work without permission, absent some defense, is simple copyright infringement. Those responsible developers who want to follow the law therefore don't use code without obtaining permission, and they pay attention to the nature and terms of that permission.
Now, maybe if you infringe the copyright of a non-GPLed program by incorporating it into your work, the copyright holder of that program might settle with you for money, whereas if you did the same thing with a GPLed program, the copyright holder might only settle for your source code. (I've seen this happen several times.) So there is a difference in motivation of some people publishing GPLed software which may make settling a copyright infringement claim by them harder. But if you weren't infringing a copyright in the first place, you wouldn't be running this risk.
The quotations collected repeat the suggestion that copyleft is anti-commerce or anti-business. It's not, but it does attack a particular business model; if you use that business model, then the GPL, by design, prevents you from using GPLed code in certain ways. (You might still be able to use it in other ways.) I don't understand why this is something to be particularly anxious about.
Copyleft critics like Brett Glass who are quoted there do have a point, to the extent that they disagree with the goals of copyleft. Because copyleft has been fairly effective at achieving its goals, if you disagree with those goals, it makes sense to criticize copyleft for its very effectiveness. But this has nothing to do with whether copyleft is a legal risk to you as a business or software developer.
(Brett Glass has a second point, which is that some people who have heard of free software don't understand copyleft or haven't learned the consequences of a particular copyleft license. It occurs to me, for example, that a lot of articles about free software in the press seem to suggest that all free software can be used by anyone in any way with no conditions -- as though it were all in the public domain. If that were the only thing you had heard about Linux, it might be surprising to you to learn about the obligations in the GPL!)
Take a look through the collection of quotations and see for yourself what you think of them. (Sorry, they're in Word format!)
