VanLUG Email Archive
> Actually, it's not free code, it's GPLed. One of the things you'd
GPL'ed means that it's as free as possible.
Earlier you mentioned (was that you or someone else? that some enhancements
were done to the BSD protocol stack software in the light of the outdated
mbuffs code which micromanages memory and isn't well suited to modern
architectures and machine configurations. Unfortunately, these changes were
done by vendors and are not available to the free software community.
Is this what is meant by free software?
> have to do to make it free (and usable by BSD folk) would be to
> remove the GPL, as the GPL insists that you change the license of
> other code not owned or written by the coder in questino.
Right; that's because it's not always easy to separate new code from old code.
What is a modification and what is an add-on?
For cases in which it is easy, the LGPL was invented. If your new code can be
shown to be sufficiently disentangled from the freeware code covered by the
LGPL according to the terms of the LGPL, then it isn't itself covered by the
license. That's why, say, Corel can release a word processor which uses
the Linux libraries without having to put the word processor under the same
license as those libraries.
The only flaw is that the author of the software must decide whether it is
component-like and therefore put it under the LGPL or whether it is
executable-like and therefore goes under the GPL.
The GPL is in line with international copyright law. If you take some existing
copyrighted work and change it, you are creating a work that is derived from
the original work. The original copyright applies even if you made genuine
additions to the work.
If you don't like that something is under the GPL, or you would like to extract
some portion of a GPL'ed program to use as a component in a proprietary
program, you can always contact the author to arrange alternate licensing
terms. Perhaps the author can be persuaded to turn a portion of the program
into a library that can be put under the LGPL.
If it weren't for the GPL, we would see all kinds of proprietary versions of
Linux by now. These would all be incompatible, just like the various BSD
flavors, and all the operating systems derived from BSD, not to mention
non-UNIX-like operating systems that contain stolen BSD code. Would Windows NT
have anything resembling reasonable networking if it weren't for the BSD
implementation? Fat chance.
I believe that the GPL protects the interests of free software developers
better than any other kind of licensing scheme, which is why many free
software developers voluntarily place their software under this license.
Making open-source freely available is only half of the battle; the other is
preventing money-hungry software corporations from stealing the work. It's a
joke when free software is exploited by enemies of free software.