[Celinux-dev] How to protect intellectual property while maximizing open source usage?

[Holger Schurig]

> However, you see the effect: Some claim that BSD has less
> momentum as Linux, e.g. when you compare user base, kernel
> developer counts etc. But your mileage may vary, especially if
> you're a BSD fan. No pun intented!

In the current Linux-Weekly-News is a nice comment by a reader 
about problems of BSD style licenses:

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GPL is the big edge of Linux over the BSDs

Posted Aug 31, 2006 23:41 UTC (Thu) by subscriber dwheeler

 There's still an active FreeBSD and OpenBSD community, and 
there's much positive to say about FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I always 
welcome a chance to talk to their developers - they're sharp 
folks. But Linux absolutely stomps the *BSDs in market share, 
even when the *BSDs are combined. And it will continue to do so 
into the foreseeable future. I think that's primarily due to the 
licensing, i.e., GPL vs. BSD.

 I think the BSD license has been a lot of trouble to the *BSDs. 
Every few years, someone says, "hey, let's start a company based 
on this BSD code!" (BSD/OS in particular comes to mind, but 
SunOS and others did the same). They pull the *BSD code in, and 
some of the best BSD developers, and write a proprietary 
derivative. But as a proprietary vendor, their fork becomes 
expensive to self-maintain, and eventually the company founders. 
All that company work is lost forever, and good developers were 
sucked away during that period. Repeat, repeat, repeat. That's 
more than enough to explain why the BSDs manage to make steps 
forward, but just don't manage to maintain the pace of Linux 
kernel development.

 Meanwhile, the GPL has legally enforced a consortia on major 
commercial companies. Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and many others are 
all contributing, and feel safe in doing so because the others 
are legally required to do the same. It's basically created 
a "safe" zone of cooperation, without anyone having to sign 
complicated legal documents. A company can't feel safe 
contributing code to the BSDs, because its competitors might 
simply copy it without reciprocating. There's much more 
corporate cooperation in the GPL'ed kernel code than with the 
BSD'd kernel code. Which means that in practice, it's actually 
been the GPL that's most "business-friendly". So while the BSDs 
have lost energy every time a company gets involved, the GPL'ed 
programs gain almost every time a company gets involved. And 
that explains it all.

[paragraph about leading style differences ommitted]

 Clearly, some really excellent projects can work well on 
BSD-style licenses; witness Apache, for example. It would be a 
mistake to think that BSD licenses are "bad" licenses, or that 
the GPL is always the "best" license. But others, like Linux, 
gcc, etc., have done better with copylefting / "protective" 
licenses. Some projects, like Wine, have switched to a 
copylefting license to stem the tide of loss from the project. 
Again, it's not as simple as "BSD license bad" - I don't think 
we fully understand exactly when each license's effects truly 
have the most effect. But clearly license matters; this as close 
to an experiment in competing licenses as you're likely to get.

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(from http://lwn.net/Articles/197748/)