[Fsfe-uk] Are GPL projects more likely to evolve faster ?

[James Heald]

There's been an ongoing debate, here and in Europe and in the States, about
whether open-source is something that Governments should actively support;
and if governments commission some new open-source code, should they prefer
a BSD style licence or a GPL style one.

Mostly these debates have been conducted in terms of wider-scale political
issue -- eg whether the GPL locks out commercial producers from building on
the open source work; and whether the open-source codebase is a public good
in itself, or whether it should be treated as just another vendor product.


But if we go with the hardest line free-market no-Government-intervention
view, I want to ask a slightly different question:

Is there any research, or plausible advocacy, that GPL projects are less
likely to fragment, and are more likely to concentrate more check-ins from
more coders than BSD projects... and so, everything else being equal, would
it make more sense for a commissioning buyer to go for a GPL licence,
because the product would subsequently be more likely to evolve more quickly
in productive and useful ways?  (And would also be more likely to achieve
3rd party add-ons and support?)


One source for such argumentation would that article about 10 days ago which
posited that copyleft judo of GPL was the real disruptive technology to
understand the onward march of open source, and proposed as a "law" that GPL
takeover was the ultimate end-stage for any software sector after it had
become dominated by a single player and ceased to develop under competitive
pressure.

Are there other good texts to argue that choosing GPL actually is a good
choice to help a project evolve better, or any academic research or
modelling on this aspect ?


   James.