Date: Mon, 3 May 1999 02:41:59 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Laurence Berland <stuyman@confusion.net> Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Kris Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905030221220.7672-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <372CA62F.B843DCEF@confusion.net>
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I just saw an article on licenses in Daemon News http://www.daemonnews.org/199905/gpl.html (which was incidentally linked on linuxtoday so a lot of linux users will read it.) The writer is of course critical but sounds like he's trying hard to say a few nice things. However, my favourite quote is this. "But the fact that the GPL can infect code derived from other GPL'ed programs, as well as the fact that the output of some GPL'ed programs must also be GPL'ed, is unacceptable. In fact, it should be contested over its shaky sense of legality in these matters. I'm not aware of any court cases involving the GPL so far, so we have yet to see what will happen when such an issue arises. I can only hope that the courts will decide against the GPL's habit of infecting other code." This is old hat, as is the claim that the GPL "does not respect intellectual property". Let me make a case that it does respect intellectual property. (1) I write some code. This is my work and my intellectual property. (2) Therefore I am not obliged to let you use it at all. (3) However, I want people to use it and improve it; I just don't want them to hoard it and restrict it. (4) Therefore I license this source code, my intellectual property, under the terms of the GPL. That means you can use it and redistribute it but only under the GPL. (5) If you don't like that, of course you're free not to use the code at all. I really see absolutely nothing wrong with this position. Yes, you're free to make changes, but it was I who gave you that freedom, under a specific licence. If I hadn't let you see the source code, there wouldn't have been any changes to make. Therefore, if you distribute your add-ons, you must do that under my terms -- because they are add-ons, not a new and completely original work. Of course, you don't have to distribute your changes at all. But once you distribute them under the GPL, that is your decision, and the licence equally applies to the next It would be equally wrong to take a BSDL'd work, develop it further, and then GPL it. Legally it may be ok, but I think it's ethically wrong, and probably RMS would agree. The original licence should be respected. Remember that when the GPL was created, and almost equally today, the norm is not to allow re-use of source code at all. So a licence like the GPL which allows you to re-use source code under certain conditions, was and still is extraordinarily permissive. To me the extremists (socialists, communists, your choice of epithet normally thrown at RMS) seem to be not the FSF but the BSD crowd, who apparently think you should be free to do absolutely *anything* with someone else's source code except claim it as your own or sue the author... Which licence is better for businesses is a question I don't want to get into. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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