(2005-07-05) Raymond Gpl Not Necessary

Eric Raymond says the GPL is no longer necessary for Open Source. I never really thought virality was a good idea in the first place, so I have to see this (extending GPL-v3 to software "distributed" as a service - ASP) as a step in the wrong direction... Stronger virality punishes defectors more effectively, but also has more tendency to scare people away from joining the open source community in the first place... I've actually been making the argument that the GPL is rationally justified only if open source is an inferior system of production since 1998. But back then, the evidence that open source is a superior system was much less clear.

• Open Standards depend on Open Source reference implementations