Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:01 UTC, submitted by Joel Dahl
The FreeBSD 7-STABLE branch saw its first point release today. Don't let the point release moniker fool you, though, as FreeBSD 7.1 comes packed with a number of pretty significant changes, such as support for OpenSolaris' DTrace, as well as a new, more efficient scheduler.
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Member since:2006-01-01
Do we all have to submit to a single license just to be able to freely share source with each other? I hope not.
Well, if there had to be one free software license "to rule them all", I'd advocate WTFPL. The FSF website says that WTFPL is "a free software license, very permissive and GPL-compatible". If you can't decide under which license you should publish your programs, WTFPL is always a safe choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
Member since:2005-07-06
Software development is a lot about code reuse
Yes, that's why even if you don't care about code 'protection' like the many devs who use GPL do, it's better to use a software license compatible with the GPL: BSD 2-clause for example, not the CDDL (which was made by Sun to prevent this code re-use).
Member since:2006-11-18
OpenSolaris and FreeBSD share a lot of code without any problem, so its not BSD nor CDDL problem, the problem is GPL2 which is compatible only with itself.
BSD and CDDL does not forbid linking with anything while GPL2 does, now it suffers greatly from their 'protection'.
Member since:
2005-07-11
It is disheartening to see this opinion always modded down. (Oh well, maybe it was the inflammatory part and not the core issue that got the post modded down.)
Listen, GPL people, all things considered we are you allies, not your enemies. Not all GPL critics are evil. I can only speak for myself: I publish source, I advocate openness of hardware and software, standards, interoperability and I oppose software patents. But, I choose a more permissive license. And I accept the cost of not being able to reuse GPL code by mixing it into my own works. Some don't seem to understand the extent of that cost.
Software development is a lot about code reuse - from naive copy&paste programming of script or web code, to porting undocumented device driver code between very different operating systems. Do we all have to submit to a single license just to be able to freely share source with each other? I hope not. That's not the ecosystem I signed up for.
As I see it, the GPL primarily solves a problem I don't care about, which is "closing" of available source. I don't see it as such a big deal. It's not like the original source disappears, or stops working and can't be developed further.