Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 21:03:26 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: molter@tin.it (Marco Molteni) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: The GPL might kill itself ? Message-ID: <199903050203.VAA00351@y.dyson.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990304101439.6177B-100000@nympha> from Marco Molteni at "Mar 4, 99 10:23:39 am"
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Marco Molteni said: > > They started with a BSD kernel and then moved to Linux. Now they have > problems with the GPL. Maybe it's the right time to contact them and > remember them of what the BSD licence is! ;-) > All it takes is an risk of the GPL people causing the problems that they have every right to impose, and alternative solutions will be sought out. People who take licenses seriously, and read them (and getting professional opinions of the effects) will be the best armed when dealing with free and errsatz-free software. Frankly, the best thing that would ever be for free software, would be for Linus to contact all of the contributors to Linux kernel and get agreement to relax the GPL restrictions, and move to a free license. Even if he wanted to, getting agreement from all of the authors would be impractical. The GPL keeps Linux from the free software world, even though it mistakenly and informally continues to be referred to as free, by those who cannot distinguish the difference between GPL and free, or those who choose to advantage themselves against those who cannot distinguish the reality of the ramifications of GPL. This (fortunately or unfortunately) leaves *BSD as the only significant free OSen for now. In the (learned) academic community, soft spoken advocacy is probably best, though. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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