Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 29th Sep 2007 21:24 UTC, submitted by Kishe
"A research firm serving the mobile phone industry has published an 18-page whitepaper about open source licensing. Entitled 'GPLv2 vs. GPLv3', the paper examines the meteoric rise of open source software, and the forces that shaped each license, before concluding with an extremely detailed point-by-point comparison."
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Member since:2005-11-15
Member since:2005-07-24
"""
BSD License = "Freedom TO"
GPL = "Freedom FROM"
GPL = "Freedom FROM"
"""
That's a reasonable observation.
From another angle:
BSD: Barriers to sharing code are do more harm than good.
GPL: Barriers to code sharing are unfortunate, but do more good than harm.
I think that the availability of FOSS licenses which have different strengths and weaknesses, to suit a variety of projects and authors has been key to our success. Even RMS agrees that Xiph's use of permissive licenses for their reference implementations for the ogg formats is preferable to copylefting them.
One should think very carefully when choosing an appropriate license... always keeping in mind that code reuse is *HARD*. Adding artificial barriers comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost might be outweighed by the advantages.
But in the end, the most important thing is that authors license their code in a way that really reflects their expectations as to what the responsibilities of the users of that code should be. If he expects the users of the code to give back, that should be in the license. Claiming to support permissive licenses and then moaning and whining when people don't pay money back to one's own project (as a certain well known leader of a permissively licensed project has done) does not help anyone.
Edited 2007-09-30 20:23
Member since:2005-08-18
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Member since:
2007-06-22
I think people who say that bsd license is a true freedom are hypocrites. If they'd cared for freedom they'd release their code in public domain and wouldn't bitch if someone wouldn't give them credit -> see recent Atheros debakle. This was off topic, I admit, but this issue gets raised every time in a gpl discussion. I think gpl was the desicive reason for open source success and also a reason why competitiors actually can stand to develop the same product (linux) together because they know they all will benefit from it. This is also a reason why companies don't contribute back to bsd-licensed pojects, because their competitor can just snatch it away, add a pair of uniqire features and give it off as their own product and gain an unfair advantage. Like the bsd stack in windows. There are a lot of examples for that. I mean apart from "i dont care for my freedom untill a nazi-government knocks on my door" crowd a lot of people actually care about things like open source drivers an free software ( as in speech ). I am not a gpl fanboy, there are clearly other licenses that accomplish the same thing, they are just like a "police" that get's sometimes annoyng, but without it you wont get the MOTIVATION of alot of people who want to see their "free" code in programs that benefit humanity and not used as a tool to enslave it (for example windows monopoly).
Edited 2007-09-30 08:22