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VanLUG Email Archive

More on Open Source licenses (Re: Portability of Linux)

Vlad Petersen
Mon, 31 Aug 1998 21:48:00 -0700

Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
...........
> Well, no, it's not against the law; it's breaking the license. It's
> not even entirely certain that that license is enforcable; it's
> never been tried in court.

I don't think it's ever been for the following reasons 1) GNU GPL is a
fairly convincing license, 2) the copyright laws are recognized by all
corporate entities 3) rms is such a big loud-mouth, :-) , that's why
those who tried to proprietarize GPL'ed code gave it back to the
community without much fighting. Among at least 4 incidents I heard of
the most prominent was when NextStep decided to develop their own
object oriented language and later used the derived Objective C (based
on GCC) throughout their system. The NextStep attorneys suggested to
release the modified code to public rather than go to court.

Also, see http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/bsd.html for rms's point of
view on the BSD license and http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/FAQ4.html#4 for
the opposite point of view albeit lot shorter and less religious.

> Regardless, you never did answer the question: why is GPL'd software
> more open, even though you can do less with it under the license?

This argument has been beaten to death. The general consensus was that
no license is more open then the other. Basically ,it comes down to
this:

1) GNU GPL/GNU LGPL/NPL/etc license followers are mostly people that
do *not* allow their code to be used in proprietary applications,
that's why it is more open.
2) BSD/Artistic/X/etc license followers are mostly people that *do*
allow their code to be used in proprietary applications, that's why it
is more open.

Is it now easier to understand how ludicrous it looks when people
argue about BSD vs GNU GPL? It does not come from the point of view of
an abstract higher authority that wants to control the way you release
your code but what you *personally* prefer. That's why I like the term
"Open Source" which mostly eliminates those differences. There's a
great resource with lots of links that covers many license issues:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/

Regards,
Vlad

-- 
     Vlad Petersen       |     <vladimip at uniserve dot com>
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