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"The BSD license is superior in every way and primarily for 2 reasons: "

Well that explains all the good commercial support and ISV's.

Well that explains all the good commercial support and ISV's.

I am sorry to wake you up. But code licensed under the BSDL and comparable licenses is used practically everywhere. From parts of opensource systems (X11, PostgreSQL), to closed-source systems (OS X, virtually everything that uses a TCP/IP stack that is not Linux or Solaris). BSDL-ed code is probably on of the best supported codebases (by license), though most users don't know they use BSDLed code.

You are probably mixing up the BSD license and the BSD operating system (for which commercial support is also widely available).

Edited 2007-01-16 16:01

The BSD license is superior in every way and primarily for 2 reasons:
1) Simplicity
2) Far less need to legislate to enforce

But alas, not one of the BSDs has reached the usage or critical mass that Linux has, primarily due to the license used. The GPL compels companies and people to put their code back into the kernel, which then snowballs the whole project along. There is no inequality.

An awful lot of people want to pretend that all that is religious fanaticism, but the fact is that Linus' choice for a license that would dictate that is simple, straightforward and everyone knows where they stand.

The people and companies who pretend that the GPL is complicated are those who simply want to use other peoples' code or create their own closed world for their own benefits - which incidentally, doesn't help any of the BSD projects in any way.

Edited 2007-01-16 16:50

>But alas, not one of the BSDs has reached the usage or critical mass that Linux has,


Because of,

>Why isn't BSD better known?
For a number of reasons, BSD is relatively unknown:

1. The BSD developers are often more interested in polishing their code than marketing it.
2. Much of Linux's popularity is due to factors external to the Linux projects, such as the press, and to companies formed to provide Linux services. Until recently, the open source BSDs had no such proponents.
3. BSD developers tend to be more experienced than Linux developers, and have less interest in making the system easy to use. Newcomers tend to feel more comfortable with Linux.
4. In 1992, AT&T sued BSDI, the vendor of BSD/386, alleging that the product contained AT&T-copyrighted code. The case was settled out of court in 1994, but the spectre of the litigation continues to haunt people. As recently as March 2000 an article published on the web claimed that the court case had been ``recently settled''.

One detail that the lawsuit did clarify is the naming: in the 1980s, BSD was known as ``BSD UNIX''. With the elimination of the last vestige of AT&T code from BSD, it also lost the right to the name UNIX. Thus you will see references in book titles to ``the 4.3BSD UNIX operating system'' and ``the 4.4BSD operating system''
5. There is a perception that the BSD projects are fragmented and belligerent. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke of ``balkanization'' of the BSD projects. Like the law suit, this perception bases mainly on ancient history.

http://www.lemis.com/bsdpaper.html

But alas, not one of the BSDs has reached the usage or critical mass that Linux has, primarily due to the license used.

OS/X, which is BSD derived, has roughly the same market share as all of the Linux distros combined.

> create their own closed world for their own benefits
> - which incidentally, doesn't help any of the BSD
> projects in any way.

I'm a GPL/LGPL supporter. It follows a quid quo pro idea (I scratch your back if you scratch mine) that ensures that you won't be "ripped off". It's the license set I'd use if I were to write software for open source.

But you're forgetting one key advantage of the BSD license -- sometimes you have code that you want to have as broadly used as possible so *want* to be ripped off (as long as you get the credit). For instance, think of the Unix standard and TCP/IP. Both succeeded precisely because they were BSD-licensed. TCP/IP in particular isn't the best protocol out there, but since it could be "ripped off" it could be used directly in everything from routers to MS-Windows to Mainframes. If the TCP/IP stack had been LGPLed, it would have been a less popular (in particular, MS-Windows would likely push it's own protocols the way they've pushed active directory).

Before anyone mentions active directory as a example of why the BSD license fails, consider this. I the Kerberos code and protocol wasn't available in BSD form, Microsoft would have no reason to stick to an existing protocol and would have developed something a lot more complex that would require a lot more reverse engineering to implement.

Firefox is the most popular open source app by far, probably one of the most essential for other OS's because of its website compatibility and is not GPL. It's tri-licensed with gpl but they won't accept any gpl code because of the MPL.

Apache is also extremely important to linux and linux wouldn't be the "server" OS without it. Linux wouldn't go anywhere without X, either.

"The GPL compels companies and people to put their code back into the kernel"

As long as you don't distribute your changes you are not compelled to do anything.