I'm sorry. Maybe the iOS app was irrelevant to his/her point. But I think most web startups would want to create iOS clients too, and that's how GPL might be a limitation to them.
> I have to ask, do you actually work in the software industry?
No, I'm just a student/programmer. I mean I'm not working in an IT department in a big company, so you've got a point there that I might not be realistic.
> All you've done is name some projects that happen to use non-GPL licenses in whole or part. You don't think companies take their output and use them in their own products without contributing back?
I named some non-GPL projects that big companies are contributing to them. And I think I missed LLVM and Clang (and the amazing static analyzer) that Apple is contributing to.
Google, Apache, Apple Yahoo, ... (even IBM) are all contributing to non-GPL open source projects - not because they have to, but because it's good for their business and they will benefit from that, and as a direct result of that, we (the developers) benefit too. <----- MY MAIN POINT
What I'm saying is this: If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place? No, they wouldn't, and they would roll out their own proprietary browser from scratch and the world would be a worse place. If Hadoop was not as liberally-licensed as it is now, do you think Yahoo would contribute to it? No.
I'm not offended - All I'm trying to say is that if you tighten up your software license, less people will use it, but they would have to contribute back. If you go with a BSD-style license, much more people will use and incorporate that project (for many reasons, including the fact that you can monetize your application much easier), and even if a small percentage of them contributes back, it's still good.
(I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't express what I want to say very well)
"If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place?"
You've got your history wrong. Apple created Webkit, so they never needed to make that decision. You meant to write "If KHTML was GPL ... " (BTW, the qualification 'pure' is meaningless here; LGPLv2 is not an 'impure' version of GPLv2.)
Steve Jobs has been anti-GPL since the NeXT days, with the Objective C contribution to gcc, so of course that's was a deciding factor for Apple. However, they could have chosen Mozilla as the basis, or purchased the technology from some other company. There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."
I do wonder if the LGPL for KHTML is what made WebKit be available in the first place, but that is not relevant for this discussion.
"If you go with a BSD-style license, much more people will use and incorporate that project ... and even if a small percentage of them contributes back, it's still good."
As far as I am aware of, there is no evidence for this assertion. I've been involved with BSD and GPL projects, and the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake. In any case, the percentage of good code feedback is usually minuscule; excepting a few large-scale projects. You can see evidence of that elsewhere. Quoting Tim Bird, ex-BusyBox developer "[I'm the] guy who lamented that the busybox lawsuits had never produced a single line of usable code added to the busybox repository."
Your comments here reflect optimism, but that optimism has little base in how software is actually developed.
You're right. I was careless there, however I knew about WebKit's root, and I use a custom fork of WebKit for one of my own projects... And I never remember which version of GPL and LGPL imposes what restriction, so what I meant by pure GPL was the most restrictive kind of GPL.
> There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."
No, there isn't. But Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that. With the current hindsight, yes, It's clear that using an open source browser was the best choice for them. But at the time, no one knew that WebKit (and Chrome) would be such a success (with the huge adaption of Chrome on desktops and Safari on iOS's). That's just the way they did and continue to do their business. So while my assertion was just a guess, it's not a baseless one. We can never know.
> ...the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake.
No comment on that, because my experience is far less than you. I just feel that it must be easier to talk a non-technical manager into using a BSD/MIT/Apache-licensed codebase than a GPL one.
Again, I agree that my comment above was sloppy and I should've made my points clearer and spell them out as my thoughts, not facts.
"Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that"
In this case, it was to break the dependency on IE. Mozilla existed for the Mac, but the Mozilla codebase was clumsy. "KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant." (Quote from Wikipedia.)
It's then a business question of how to develop the project: proprietary/licensed (like IE and Opera), proprietary/internal (like ... AOL?), or public (like Mozilla). I think Opera was enough to give some estimate on the market size, and show there isn't all that much of a benefit to staying proprietary.
But hindsight is 20/20. I don't know why Apple went from releasing only WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the LGPL components of WebKit) to releasing all of WebKit (the rest under a BSD license, I think).
> I have to ask, do you actually work in the software industry?
No, I'm just a student/programmer. I mean I'm not working in an IT department in a big company, so you've got a point there that I might not be realistic.
> All you've done is name some projects that happen to use non-GPL licenses in whole or part. You don't think companies take their output and use them in their own products without contributing back?
I named some non-GPL projects that big companies are contributing to them. And I think I missed LLVM and Clang (and the amazing static analyzer) that Apple is contributing to.
Google, Apache, Apple Yahoo, ... (even IBM) are all contributing to non-GPL open source projects - not because they have to, but because it's good for their business and they will benefit from that, and as a direct result of that, we (the developers) benefit too. <----- MY MAIN POINT
What I'm saying is this: If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place? No, they wouldn't, and they would roll out their own proprietary browser from scratch and the world would be a worse place. If Hadoop was not as liberally-licensed as it is now, do you think Yahoo would contribute to it? No.
I'm not offended - All I'm trying to say is that if you tighten up your software license, less people will use it, but they would have to contribute back. If you go with a BSD-style license, much more people will use and incorporate that project (for many reasons, including the fact that you can monetize your application much easier), and even if a small percentage of them contributes back, it's still good.
(I'm not a native English speaker, so I can't express what I want to say very well)