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Date:      Mon, 3 May 1999 00:28:31 +0530 (IST)
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
To:        Laurence Berland <stuyman@confusion.net>
Cc:        Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Kris Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au>
Subject:   Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905030021220.7536-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in>
In-Reply-To: <372C9BD8.5C24D091@confusion.net>

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> that if it does something bad I can't be blamed.  If you consider the goal of
> the GPL to be to preserve the free redistributability (is that a word?) of a
> piece of software, then the GPL does just that.

That is exactly the goal of the GPL. 
To put it another way, the BSD licence may give more freedom to
the next programmer; but then, users all the way down the line
below that can lose their freedom. The GPL's aim is to prevent
that.

> On a side note, lets try and convince the authors of some GPL software we use
> to rerelease it under the BSD license.  How can they do that?  There is one
> group that can make a non-GPL version of GPL software, that group being the
> copyright holder.  They can break their own license, and the only one who could
> sue them would be themselves. :)

Practical point: unless it's written by one or very few people, you'll
never succeed. Most of the interesting and well-established
programs contain contributions from 100s of people and they'll
all have to agree to change the licence. That apart, I think the
idea sucks anyway... 

This is getting way off track from my original post (which was,
advocate FreeBSD but don't diss others) so I'll shut up now.



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