Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:37:23 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Licensing Philosophy Message-ID: <15171.21587.240137.565088@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010703234545.045afc30@localhost> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20010703151716.00ca8a70@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20010703141550.045f5340@localhost> <20010626174756.A61831@blackhelicopters.org> <200106260901.AA23134284@stmail.pace.edu> <20010626122845.A11960@xor.obsecurity.org> <20010626214230.D461@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> <20010702211810.B325@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20010703234545.045afc30@localhost>
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Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> types: > My personal opinion (and that of many others, though most of them are not > as vocal as the GPL zealots) is that the FreeBSD project should take a > much stronger stance against the GPL, because the GPL is contrary to the > goal of having code that "may be used for any purpose and with no strings > attached." I agree with Kirk McKusick, one of the "fathers" of BSD, who said: > > "The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is > what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, > which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and > then Berkeley had what we called "copycenter", which is "take it down > to the copy center and make as many copies as you want." While the most vocal people on the list may not approve of the current stance, the majority of the people seem to like it. It meets the goal of providing code that can be used with no strings attached, without either alienating others in the open source community, or preventing code with other licenses from being used if necessary. Code that must be shipped with a running system has to have a BSD compatible license. For other parts of the system, if there is code available with a BSD compatible license, that will generally be used in preference to code that has an incompatible license. So anyone building a system on BSD can ship a system that may be used for any purpose, while those who have purposes that allow more restrictive licenses don't have to integrate code with such licenses to get required functionality. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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