Sorry, let me clarify that point... the major work that was lost was done by a COMMUNITY project, not one of ID's in-house ones. His point is that as the xGPL forces the release of source code with any binaries, so any valuable work like this won't be lost to the community.
In that case, it seems to me that his remarks are a complete non sequitur. The source code of "community" projects that license their work under the MIT X or BSD license is every bit as publicly available as that of projects that use the GPL.
No, they are not. On the basis that a developer is not required to pass on his code or make it available under X/BSD/etc licenses, whereas the main benefit of the xGPL liicenses are the very viral properties you appear to reject. Ask almost anyone who has licensed a project under the GPL, and you can guarantee the main reason is to ensure the viral licensing keeps the source in open distribution.
In fact, the GPL would actually reduce the likelihood of recovering the code from someone's box, because commercial programmers such as myself won't look at it or download it.
Brett, no personal offence, but commercial programmers such as yourself who are so damn close-minded to take this stand... do not count for but 1% of people who do meaningful work on community projects.
MANY of the best programmers on GPL or GPL-like projects are commercial programmers in real life. Sure, you can say the GPL may taint your programming. But whats to stop you being fired because your COMMERCIAL work has influenced code you wrote for an open-source project?
Several times I have stop working on a GPL project becaues my employer wanted me to work on some commercial project with some similarity. Did I stop because I thought the GPL would would taint me? No, although I was aware of that risk.... I stopped because I thought my commercial work would taint the open-source code.
It is a simple fact that thousands upon thousands of commercial programmers work on open-source virally licensed projects. With no problem at all. As several people in this discussion keep asking for landmark cases to prove the effectiveness of then GPL - can you provide legal documentation pointing to GPL contamination of a commercial project?
- James 'Ender' Brown