Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 07:14:06 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GPL vs BSD Licence Message-ID: <417F82FE.6030201@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNOEINEPAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> References: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNOEINEPAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>
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Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: [ ... ] > You might consider that opensource.org is NOT a BSD site, it was > setup by Linux people not BSD people. Sort of. The Open Source definition started from Debian guidelines about "free software". However, the OSI board has people from various organizations besides Linux on there, including Sun (Danese Cooper), IBM/the Apache project (Ken Coar). You'll find people lurking from Apple (Ernie Prabhakar), Python/Zope, and various other projects. There seems to be less input from BSD-specific people besides Apple, true, but the BSD and MIT licenses are much less complicated than newer licenses and have been around longer, so perhaps people here don't see much need to spend time debating software license issues. > There has been little interest from opensource.org in FreeBSD or anything > other than Linux. This is not true of most people who are active on the OSI Open Source lists. > In fact, they are so bigoted that Bruce Perens, who was one of the > founders of OSI, got completely disgusted with them and left. > Details of this were documented in an interview Bruce did for > the September 2001 issue of Linux Magazine, pages 35-38 Perhaps so. There are some people there who cross the line into rabid Linux evangelism, but you can find OS zealots pretty much anywhere. Nevertheless, I got the impression that the issue you refer to had more to do with a personal conflict between Bruce Perens and ESR. > You would get far better information about the BSD license from > a BSD-related site, like the FreeBSD link I supplied above. Larry Rosen provides legal services for them, and he knows his stuff. > The Open Source Initiative is not "about as authoritative a > reference as exists for free and open source licenses" It is > a political PR machine that exists to keep Eric Raymond able > to command expensive speaking fees from ignorant people > who don't know any better. Besides the OSI, there is the Free Software Foundation, and the Creative Commons effort. Saying that the OSI is not an authoritative reference for "open source" is a lot like saying the FSF isn't authoritative on what "free software" means. No doubt ESR has his own agenda, but he is reasonably open about his positions, his goals, and the methods he uses to achieve them. -- -Chuck
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