Open Source Commercialism and Burke's Law

Edmund Burke noted that:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

There was a post on Techdirt that to my mind exemplifies how this will play out in the Open Source world - as it becomes more valuable, commercial interests are increasingly trying to subvert its precepts.

One of the recent Open Source issues was the Skype attempt to avoid the implications of having some of its code under GPL, and avoid having to release their adds to it. They have since backed down on this, as it was a fairly easily defendable direct contradiction of the terms of the GPL - see more here on Groklaw.

What interested me about the Techdirt piece is I think it shows the way the commercial interests will now try and play the game, by chipping away at the rationale for strong Open Source Licences, and trying to subvert by overt reasonability, but with a clear subtext - what I have previously called the 3-cup-shuffle tactic: I extract the following lines from the piece to show examples:

But even if the (GPL) license was invalidated, either in this case or another, there's an argument to be made that the GPL has already served its purpose...

....But today, with open source firmly established as a cultural and commercial force, the GPL's relevance may be waning...

....And an increasing number of very high profile projects, like Mozilla, Apache and Open Office, have seen fit to create their own licenses or employ the less restrictive LGPL.

If you read the original, these lines are thrown into paragraphs which sound very reasonable...but the thrust is clear - we don't need to have GPL anymore, Open Source freedom is assured etc etc, we can let up a bit, we're all reasonable people after all - and those Open Source people are such Zealots, no?.

Wikipedia lists the percentage of GPLed projects on Sourceforge.net and Freshmeat.net, two large open source software repositories, as 68% and 65%, respectively, as of November '03 and January '06. Today, the most recently available numbers show that Sourceforge's share has fallen to 65%, and Freshmeat's share has fallen to to 62%.

This is, of course, a small decline, and the GPL remains the world's most popular open source license by a considerable margin. But it does seem as though there may be a slowly decreasing appetite for the license's militant approach to copyleft ideals

I certainly don't wish Skype well in its probably-quixotic tilt at the GPL, but if they were to somehow get lucky at least they'd be doing so at a point in the open source movement's history when the GPL is decreasingly essential.

You can see the line taken - Militant? Copyleft. We're all reasonable people here chaps, right - lets see if we can reach a compromise......

At this point you hopefully wake up from the spell and go "Waiitaminute - it wasn't broken - why are we compromising here again"?

Hopefully.

Sadly, the usual outcome is that a lobby of a few organised parties can usually walk off with the spoils from under the noses of the disorganised, distracted masses.