On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek@r-project.org
> wrote:

> In practice this issue seldom arises as the whole idea of open source is
> collaborative development, i.e., it explicitly allows others to modify and
> redistribute the code. There is often at least a semi-centralized entity
> that represents a given product (be it just the software version control
> repository) and if someone likes the idea but wants to use it in a different
> direction s/he creates a fork and thus creates a kind of sibling. The idea
> in open source world is that this enriches the choices since users can use
> whichever of the two they like better, so there will be natural selection.
> Unmaintained or less useful branches will just die and the maintained ones
> will live on -- this happens very frequently and you can often find multiple
> branches of projects -- some work together with their siblings (e.g if the
> fork is to port it to another platform they usually merge back or contribute
> back once in a while) some don't. Clearly, the idea is that this is good for
> the community, not necessarily for the ego of the authors ;). Although your
> copyright notice will survive, your ideals won't necessarily.
>

Collaborative development should not be confused with Darwinian evolution.
The former recognizes the humanity of the
participants and is about sharing and cooperation, the latter is blind (like
the blindfolded deity of justice and other
contractual relationships) and views life as the evolution of a collection
of mindless robotic parasites ("selfish genes").
The latter view has helped to land us in the current economic crisis, for
example.

GPL applies the Darwinian view to the propagation of software ideas, and it
can be viewed as the natural
response to the problem that software ideas are very easy to copy
(biologists call this cheap signalling).
On the other hand, I think developers are motivated by the need to be part
of a community, and the unstated
rules for membership in such communities are not in the scope of GPL. Thus I
think we can agree to agree
that we will not resolve these issues here!

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