Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 14:13:12 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Linus on IRC Message-ID: <199902131913.OAA05365@y.dyson.net> In-Reply-To: <7a2k5g$mgp$1@mips.rhein-neckar.de> from Christian Weisgerber at "Feb 13, 99 02:22:56 am"
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Christian Weisgerber said: > > > It is part of both a strategy of the advocates, and partly a result of > > the lack of information of those who know nothing else. > > I don't think anybody is advocating against BSD. > Your statement might be true (that you don't see that it is and has happened), but it is indeed also true that there is and has been significant advocacy in the Linux camp against *BSD and the BSD license. Alot of advocacy happens by word of mouth, and it does exist. Linux's only major handicap as time goes on is and will be the GPL. No matter how good it gets, it is stuck with it now. That doesn't mean that the *BSD's should be complacent because of it's superior free license, and part of my work is to support leapfrogging some technology for the (free) BSD projects. I respect, but am not strongly influenced by other peoples political or economic agenda associated with hatred of companies or certain industry. My interest is that free work that I do be free, and not be encumbered with silly hoops for users of my work to jump through. The "manifesto" seems to be born out of hatred and/or frustration, and maybe it is simply from day one orthogonal to my interests. I kind of like the sort of license that says: use my code, but don't steal credit from me. You don't even have recode my work to get credit or freer use, and so in order to avoid that, I already give you very free use. I also don't take away your right to spend hours, days or months to enhance the work that I did, and profit by selling the derived works -- I support your freedom to do with your own source code as you see fit, including freely redistributing it, without my own excessive control over you. I am not crazy enough to believe that your selling the derived works makes my original code unavailable, because it is my intent and desire to help others with my labor -- but not overly influence (force or trick) you to give your time away. The really cool thing about this is that others who are really moral and ethical tend either to free their derived works or keep it proprietary. It seems to me that those who arbitrarily relicense derived works are being petty (unless, of course their work is substantial), and violate the spirit of free software. In this case the relicensers are no different or even worse than the proprietary redistributors. Proprietary redistributors have the moral advantage of profiting from their work -- profit is not bad, unless excessive. In our world, profit is the way to feed families, give to charities, and to jumpstart the flow of money. By restricting redistribution for "religious" purposes, it only restricts the degrees of freedom for profit, and with decreased interest in a source base for reference works. The possibility of taint comes into play, where patches made against code with ugly and restrictive license will likely come under the more restrictive and unfriendly terms. Those who believe that credits requirements are "wrong" should reconsider their values, because those credits are being requested by the owner and developer of the software. If someone is advertising a specific feature as provided by a piece of software it seems to be fair payment to the developer to provide some kind of credit... The same kind of thing happens in the entertainment industry, and isn't really right or wrong. It is also possible to avoid mentioning the feature, and this allows the small startup, or someone who is not depending primarily on the feature to avoid the complications (however minor) of providing credits on ads. Of course, the cost of providing credits in binary and/or source and documentation distributions is trivial, and not worth talking about. Such (distribution, non ad) credits are necessary in any case using the BSDL, but as I said, trivial in cost. IP workers produce IP for their living. I contend that it is immoral to suggest that workers not get paid for work whose results are valued. Since the worker *will* get paid, money has to be derived from a source other than their direct effort. Licenses that do not value the work provided by past, current or future labor have little in the way of morality to show for themselves. In fact, support schemes depend on the IP workers work being defective, in order for a support product to be worthwhile!!!! Licenses that force cloaking development costs as support costs don't provide for the open and honest communication between supplier and customer as to the real support cost overhead needed to fulfill the support contract. Also, such a support supplier, often very dependent on the free labor from the net, easily sell access to software that is normally available on the net, without full disclosure as to the real costs and effort involved. This is purely an artifact of net-wisdom that supports the sometimes mistaken notion that there is incremental value-added provided to that customer, when there is often little other than packaging, and effectively and FTP command and CDROM pressing :-). Given that, access to free software should cost about what WC charges for a CDROM product, and support should cost a reasonable rate. By restricting access to free software, it is very dishonest to call the software free. Most good software that I use needs very little support. If I need to pay for lots of support, it calls the quality of the software into question... Or maybe... I shouldn't be paying for support, if the software is of reasonable quality, right? -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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