On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 16:07 +0530, steve wrote:
not necessarily - a lot of people just do not touch GPL code - they prefer to contribute code to projects with a more free license.
define 'lot'. Judging by pure numbers /maybe/ GPL projects are lesser than those licensed under a <sarcasm>more free</sarcasm> license but judging by the *rate* of improvement GPL projects tend to move much more faster (which proves what I said about the engineering suitability of the GPL too). -- Of course you have to compare apples to apples (eg: Linux to *BSD) not apples to oranges (eg: Python to Linux).
for your information, the growth of linux is not due to the license - it is due to the methodology. I do not know much about the BSD operating system and it's history - I am talking about the BSD license. And if you will really want to compare, I suggest you compare BSD OS with the quintessential GPL project - GNU hurd.
or even better, why not compare linux to hurd? same license - why not the same speed of development?