Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 11:48:22 -0800 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Dennis Jun <dennisjun@home.com> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD licence vs GPL Message-ID: <3A941B86.29F35473@acuson.com> References: <046d01c09bd0$1e8bdfc0$0300a8c0@wilma>
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Dennis Jun wrote: > > Hello all! > > ... So I wanted to ask some people who do program and > contribute to BSD what their thoughts on this is. Does it bother you? Is > it even an issue? Much thanx in advance. It's not even an issue. I don't contribute to any BSD OS project, but all of my own software is under the BSD license. I use the BSD license because I want to share my code with the world, pure and simple. I'm not giving it away, or I would place it in the public domain. And I'm not keeping all to myself, by making it proprietary and selling rights to use it. I'm just sharing it. And sharing means no strings attached. The FSF talks a lot about freedom, but software licensing has very little to do with freedom. First, Free Software is not similar to Free Speech. Not even close. Preventing developers from distributing their works under proprietary licenses would be a *violation* of their free speech. Second, claiming that the GPL is more free than the BSDL because it has more restrictions is ludicrous. That's like arguing you can't have free elections in a democracy because otherwise a monarch might run for office and win. What if someone came along and created a closed source derivative of my code and made a million bucks off of it? I would be pissed. But it wouldn't matter. I get pissed all the time at the numbskulls that keep electing morons into public office, but I'm not about to restrict their freedom to vote. If the reason your friend is gung-ho over the GPL is the freedom issue, then he needs to learn more about freedom. Freedom is not convenient. Freedom is not safe. Freedom is not conformity. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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