Anyway, some of greygeeks objections apply just as equally to the GPL as well, and is actually used as a business model for many companies. For example when a company requires copyright assignment for any contributions – it may be so they can re-license it for other purposes, including proprietary ones. Although it’s a double-edged sword. A project I was working on was completely GPL, but we could not use any other GPL libraries or code because it would have ‘tainted’ the copyright, and messed up the licensing of additional proprietary components which were the mechanism to make money (the code wasn’t written in an externally extensible manner). Although on a practical level it didn’t matter a whole lot – we enjoyed reimplementing everything – it actually meant that it wasn’t so much a piece of free software as an ‘open source’ one, and I found it quite frustrating.

On the other hand, you have something like the linux kernel with no copyright assignment, so nobody can own it. But now, because of short sighted decisions like removing the ‘or later version’ , they can never re-license it. And despite the shared copyrights, linus’s view is simply `worth’ more than anyone else’s – e.g. the legality of binary modules.

Very often Grey’s intelligent interventions are much better than the article he comments on.