From owner-freebsd-advocacy Wed Feb 21 12:21:59 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1FF9937B401 for ; Wed, 21 Feb 2001 12:21:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA67190; Wed, 21 Feb 2001 15:21:43 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <3A93BC1A.F7CF6FB5@netzero.net> References: <3A93BC1A.F7CF6FB5@netzero.net> Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 15:21:41 -0500 To: Kevin Brunelle , freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: BSD licence vs GPL Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 8:01 AM -0500 2/21/01, Kevin Brunelle wrote: >John Baldwin wrote: > > . . . If I'm giving it away, I'm giving it away. > >This is one thing that really bothers me about GPL defenders. >They seem to have a different definition of what it means to >give something away. GPL'd code is not really free; you have >to return your enhancements to the programmer. Let's just talk about what your feelings are about code you write, and not get too upset about how other people feel about code they write. It is tricky to talk about these religious issues without descending into some kind of mud-slinging contest, but it would be nice if we could do it. My opinion is that if you write the code, you have the right to choose the license for it. For the things I work on ("systems-level" things), I think a BSD-license works fine and I am quite comfortable with it. I can see that others might not feel comfortable with it for other projects, as they want to be sure that their original intent ("open source") is maintained. For something as large as an entire operating-system project, the first hurdle is to have that OS doing "enough" to make it worthwhile for a large enough group of people. It maybe that a GNU-style license is useful at that stage. However, once you DO have enough people contributing to the project, then the danger of a "closed-source" fork running away with the project is pretty minor. You would need too many full-time employees dedicated to just keeping up with the open-source version. And by letting the code be used in "more commercial" projects, my feeling is that you're MORE likely to get contributions from companies for the open-source project you are interested in, even if they hold a back some portion of their source code for themselves. Just my opinion. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message