Why I use GPL - Zed Shaw

That post is strange regarding its use of licenses and implications, and also is probably some years old (it is hard to say, without a date / timestamp in it).<p>a) The GPL does not enforce "giving back" for server software, if that software is only running on servers but not provided for download. The Affero GPL [1] is meant to close this "gap".<p>b) Lamson 1.0, released almost two years ago [2], is actually licensed BSD/GPL, making the point of the post moot, unless it was written before the release.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://lamsonproject.org/blog/2010-07-07.html" rel="nofollow">http://lamsonproject.org/blog/2010-07-07.html</a>

"Let me give you an idea of how advanced Mongrel was. Remember the “new” attack on Apache called Slowloris that was recently released? I actually predicted that attack, and wrote Mongrel so that it was resistant (as much as Ruby could let me). I called it the “trickle attack” and even demonstrated it. That was in 2004. Five years ago."<p>Zed needs a history lesson. David Filo at Yahoo! figured it out at least 4 years before Zed did, and patched FreeBSD to provide accept filters in release 4.0. They buffer the request at the kernel level so that the application stack doesn't even see the HTTP request until it's fully formed.<p><a href="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=accept_filter&#38;sektion=9" rel="nofollow">http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=accept_filter&#38;s...</a>

Zed wrote this a few years ago. None of my business, but I am curious if the dual license business model for Lamson before he extended the licensing options to include BSD.<p>I would like to see high profile developers like Zed and Chris Granger fund more projects using services like Kickstarter (as Chris did for Light Table). People who do useful work deserve to be paid for it, and this is one good approach for well known developers.

The guy must be damn sure about how cool his projects are, because there's a situation where your project is cool enough for company to use but they won't because of GPL. It would probably work with startups (they're flexible and in a hurry — they'll take the coolest thing around without a second thought), but it may not work with bigger companies. Quite contrary, I believe that big companies tend to use software licensed under BSD, though I have no personal experience with that.<p>I also want to express my gratitude for a different view of startups — I definitely never thought of them as a bunch of guys who would take as much open source software as possible but hide the fact, all in a name of perceived smartness, innovativeness and productivity.