Thirteen companies, including Motorola and Acer, have been handed letters claiming they have failed to comply with the GNU General Public License.
Companies accused of violating the GPL
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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> > Essentially I wouldn’t be working for free, I would get
> > back what I gave and more.
> Essentially, the vast majority of open source developers are
> working for free. It’s RedHat, Novell, and IBM making the
> money. They love having all these unpaid developers. People
> that license under BSD know it’s a gift anyway.
I think this is wrong. The developers of GPL’ed code *are* paid, not in money but in code. This is actually my view of the GPL, it’s not about freedom but rather some kind of pay-by-code contract. But then, paying shared knowledge with shared knowledge is of advantage for both sides.
I have to say that the vision behind the GPL is very clear and very promising. It just seems to turn out quite different. In many cases, what was a vision of shared knowledge became reality of license incompatibilities, zealotry, MS-bashing and “my-code-is-allowed-to-suck-because-it’s-free”. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because you can *offer* knowledge sharing, but you cannot *enforce* it. That’s also why I hold more hope in the BSD license.
If you use a free license that is meant to benefit *everybody*, then it will also benefit your enemy. – Morin
THANK YOU for that. The one thing people don’t understand about giving it away or the high and mighty idealism.
Oh, and AdamW.
You mean, unlike people who do _important_ things with their spare time, like posting on OSNews comment threads?
Wow, good burn. Nice to know when you cannot come up with a good arguement against the post you go right after the user. Take notes people, THIS is the difference between making an arguement and trolling.
If “the goal” is to share code then the BSD license does have more hope, because the BSD has the ability to be used by more developers and thus benefits more users of software.
I’d like to see one of the guys that wrote the BSD TCP/IP stack come out and say “yeah, i’m pretty bitter that Microsoft stole my code”. I bet you would have them saying “it’s great that so many people around the world are using my code”. The same goes for Apple.
“Any business not using GPL software when they don’t develop software is really missing out on some great functionality for their business, which they can modify to their own needs.”
Yes and no. Because consider that if you decide to use GPL code in your own applications, you pretty much commit yourself to the fact that you are never going to use a commercial library in your application. Becauses chances are it will be impossible to resolve licensing conflicts between the GPL and that commercial library. So what if some really cool new commercial library comes along that I decide I want to use? I can’t if I have built my application with GPL code. I have effectively locked myself into open source and locked myself into not being able to use closed source libraries.
Because of this, I would only use GPL code if it had a dual licensing option so that if at some later date, I needed to change to a new license to accomidate some new commercial library or something, I would be able to do that. So GPL stuff like QT or MySQL is OK because it offers dual licensing. But I would stay far away from GPL code that does not have a commercial license option.
Note that I am specifically talking aboud developing applications that use GPL code here, not developing on GPL platforms. Developing on GPL platforms has none of the above issues.
Lumbergh, the reason you’ve already lost this argument is that the BSD can be used for a proprietary project, which will take freedoms from users that don’t realize there might be a free alternative. I haven’t lost anything, because I love equal freedoms, like the freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press. Becausee you don’t respect those freedoms, you have already lost and will continue to lose for the rest of your life.
“Nope, Microsoft can’t force anything on you unless you buy their products.”
If you support slavery, then that’s your problem. I believe in equal freedom. Your friend wrote that I want equal opporutnities… that’s right. Freedom is based on it… freedom of speech and others.
“And since they won’t take your code anyway since it’s GPL’d, nobody gets improvements.”
I have received tons of code from companies that use gpl. Heard of trolltech? Know of companies like red hat which improv the code to gnome and hundreds of other projects? You can put up a smoke screen but hopefully you realize this is bs.
“Essentially, the vast majority of open source developers are working for free. It’s RedHat, Novell, and IBM making the money. They love having all these unpaid developers. People that license under BSD know it’s a gift anyway.”
But they get paid back in spades when they receive better code by sharing it with ohters. I could take Red hat’s distribution, change the logos and sell it tomorrow. Can’t do the same with proprietary software built from the bsd.
“The gpl doesn’t force anybody to be open and compete directly. RedHat, Novell, IBM or anybody else can take the linux kernel and throw a completely closed userland on top of it.”
Please, you know this is FUD, why spread it? The kernel itself is gpl. Have you heard of CentOS and Whitebox? You are really stretching your argument here.
The BSD can be used however anyone wants, products licensed by it can be made proprietary. I explained it quite easily earlier about how it can be free at the source, but misused downstream. Of course then you have to have the ability and knowhow to find the source, which most people don’t… and why you enable those who would subject others to slavery.
You really haven’t refuted any of my earlier claims… Microsoft is a monopoly, and they could benefit from the gpl, but it would open a floodgate to decreasing the strength of their monopoly, and would make them have to be competitive on a different level.
Any company using the gpl exclusively could be brought to its knees tomorrow by a competing product. Why you are so in love with the idea of monopolies and supporting them I can’t say.
Anonymous? You are agreeing with the woman who had equal rights under the law, but didn’t have equal opportunity? You are against the civil rights movement which gave all people equal freedom?
What’s the point of the BSD license anyway? It’s really not a license at all. All it says is property of the University of California. Does anybody really care when they use the code? What would be the difference of not licensing that code at akk? What possible difference would it make? Why not just send free donations to MS, Apple, etc.?
“Yes and no. Because consider that if you decide to use GPL code in your own applications, you pretty much commit yourself to the fact that you are never going to use a commercial library in your application. Becauses chances are it will be impossible to resolve licensing conflicts between the GPL and that commercial library. So what if some really cool new commercial library comes along that I decide I want to use? I can’t if I have built my application with GPL code. I have effectively locked myself into open source and locked myself into not being able to use closed source libraries.”
Not true, you can combine the gpl with anything you want in your own possession. If you own a business with 100 computers and you use gpl programs, you can do whatever you want with the gpl code on all of those systems. You can combine it with proprietary stuff or whatever… connect it to commercial libraries however you like.
It is only if you tried to distribute it to someone else, giving them ownership, that you would have a conflict… but traditional businesses don’t share this sort of infrastructure with each other anyways. Of course, if we are only talking about a library, you can give someone the gpl code… they can buy the commercial library… you can give them directions to how you used them together… and then you would have complete compliance with the gpl.
I think you are misperceiving the gpl… though do what suits you.
“This is actually my view of the GPL, it’s not about freedom but rather some kind of pay-by-code contract.”
It’s actually about equal freedom to all, even to people downstream. It isn’t about business or payment really, it is about a free software movement that guarentees equal freedoms like free speech guarentees equal freedoms to all people.
BSD only guarentees freedom at the source, at any place downstream it can lose its freedom completely.
> Not true, you can combine the gpl with anything you want
> in your own possession.
This is the issue of “license incompatibilities” I mentioned. The emphasis of this quote is on “your own possession”. The “virulency” of the GPL is threefold, with increasing power but also problems:
1. Modified GPL’ed programs must be GPL’ed themselves – no problem, this is only fair and doesn’t harm anyone. This is also the only of the three points which is present in the LGPL (maybe the LGPL is even more useful than the BSDL because of this point).
2. Applications based on GPL’ed libraries must be GPL’ed. Might be a problem for some companies, but if you don’t like it, don’t use it. This is the basis for the “pay by code contract”.
3. GPL’ed applications may only use GPL’ed libraries. This is the problematic point. I understand that one cannot separate it from #2. However, sometimes a developer wants to use GPL’ed libraries, and is ready to give his own code away under the GPL, but also use a third-party GPL-incompatible library. But still the GPL would force him to release code of the library under the GPL which he doesn’t own at all.
This third point is not only overly restrictive and unfair, at also works against the goals of the GPL since code remains unwritten or closed that would otherwise be published under the GPL. However, as said before, The GPL cannot work without this restriction, as otherwise any application could be transformed to a pseudo-library, making point #2 useless as well.
> “This is actually my view of the GPL, it’s not about
> freedom but rather some kind of pay-by-code contract.”
>
> It’s actually about equal freedom to all, even to people
> downstream. It isn’t about business or payment really, it
> is about a free software movement that guarentees equal
> freedoms like free speech guarentees equal freedoms to
> all people.
>
> BSD only guarentees freedom at the source, at any place
> downstream it can lose its freedom completely.
I understand this, and I think the vision behind the GPL is a desirable one (BTW, it’s the *same* as the vision behind the BSDL, although I have seen it being advertised as “the vision behind the BSDL” because it’s an intuitive one, especially in the academic world where BSD originates).
The difference is that the BSDL comes as an offer and with the risk to be exploited, while the GPL comes as a kind of contract and with force. Different methods, same goal.
correction: I have _never_ seen the BSDL being advertised as (…)
I said “Nope, Microsoft can’t force anything on you unless you buy their products.”
and you said “If you support slavery, then that’s your problem. I believe in equal freedom. Your friend wrote that I want equal opporutnities… that’s right. Freedom is based on it… freedom of speech and others.” in response
You’ve lost it completely and you’re lucky that the thread has pretty much petered out to minimize any more embarrassment on your part. But keep on trying to inject your leftist political ideologies into the software license. It’s always good for a laugh.
The AQ kiddie has lost it completely when his subject line is slavery.
It’s pretty much Godwin’s law applied to the GPL nuts.
“3. GPL’ed applications may only use GPL’ed libraries. This is the problematic point.”
This isn’t true. Think about the implications if it were true. All GPL applications on Windows would be illegal since they would violate their own license. After all, almost all Windows applications have to link to the Win32 API, which is closed source and propreitary, and does not come with any permissions for you to redistribute it. Sure the link happens at runtime, but it dosn’t matter. The GPL does not make a distincting betwene static linking and dynamic linking.
It seems you realize all of these only take effect on distribution, Morin.
Of course the 3 points are fact in terms of distribution. I would hope anyone planning on using the GPL studies it first. How would the gpl’d program work without the proprietary library? It wouldn’t, so I can see why they built it so that free programs would work. Now I sympathise with the person who wants to offer his work under gpl… but if that restriction wasn’t in there, then tons of proprietary companies would put out gpl’d software and then sell proprietary libraries to make them work. The whole idea behind the gpl is freedom. If that clause wasn’t in there it would be the most abused loophole in the software industry. I can certainly see why they put it in. This is a freedom software movement, and the inventors of the gpl didn’t want any of those freedoms to hinge on proprietary software.
Lumbergh
“But keep on trying to inject your leftist political ideologies into the software license. It’s always good for a laugh.”
The GPL was written by Richard Stallman… a liberal… for a free software movement, like a free speech movement. It is political, and he has never denied it.
Being beholden to monopolies is the same as endorsing the slavery of the unaware and endorses the destruction of innovative competition. I think you’re as big a nut as you think I am.
“Wow, good burn. Nice to know when you cannot come up with a good arguement against the post you go right after the user. Take notes people, THIS is the difference between making an arguement and trolling.”
Well, I hate to sound childish, but it was after all _you_ who was uncharitable enough to suggest that people who write useful code in their spare time and make it available for others to use are people ‘with way too much time on their hands’. I simply pointed out that your using your free time in such an unproductive manner as *complaining about how other people use theirs on comment threads* was a little…ironic.
Microsoft force a lot of things on people who don’t buy their software. They also effectively ‘force’ people to buy their software who probably wouldn’t in a truly competitive marketplace. This is the inevitable effect of monopolies (which are, after all, the enemy of free market capitalism, which I thought we were all supposed to be in favour of…)
Anonymous? You are agreeing with the woman who had equal rights under the law, but didn’t have equal opportunity? You are against the civil rights movement which gave all people equal freedom?
If a man who runs his own business doesn’t want to hire women, or black people, or white people, then no one has the right to force him to. The *state*, on the other hand, must not discriminate against anyone for unsupportable reasons, including when the state engages in forms of business.
Discrimination and hate are morally wrong and socially bad, but being discriminated against is different than having my rights violated. If someone doesn’t want to hire me because I’m white, that is their call. I can hate them back, but I can’t justly force them to give me a job. To do so would be to undermine everyone’s property rights, my own included.
Is there more to opportunity than having a level playing field? Sure. And there is more to freedom than equality before a set of just laws. But government cannot rightly be involved in establishing anything beyond the level playing field. Discrimination and hate are not crimes. They do not violate anyone’s fundamental human rights. They are social problems, and society (distinct from government) must find solutions to them.
And the point remains that government cannot actually give more than equal rights without taking away something else. If it tries to eradicate discrimination through laws, then it is underminding property rights, because I should be able to dispose of my property however I want. If the government says I have to consider so-and-so for a job, it’s telling me how I can and can’t choose to dispose of my money. This means that the money was never really mine in any meaningful sense. It always belonged to the government, to the majority or the dictator or whatever, and I just never knew before because I hadn’t crossed them yet. As soon as you cross them, they give the chain a yank and then things become crystal clear.
To set a few points about political ideologies.
Communism, fascism and nazism are all three variations of hardcore socialism and therefore monopolistic and anti-kapitalistic and anti-freedom – and btw: these systems is based upon a goverment taking full control of every single aspect of _YOUR_ life (like Microsoft, some might say
.
GPL _HAS_ nothing to do with communism, but a lot to do with democrazy – and therefore freedom.
GPL effectively removes monopoles by securing competition by securing your right to do whatever you want, as long as you secure other persons rights to the same (the principle behind democrazy and societies without government – which is the opposite idea of communism, fascism, nazism and all other non-free systems).
There is a lot of FUD around the GPL, and a lot of stupid disagreements between BDS,X11,MIT-“supporters” and GPL-“supporters”.
BSD and other weak licenses have nothing to do with “academic sharing” as some has put it. That is a nonsense sentence. The GPL is no way less or more academic – the GPL just protects the freedom rights, while the weaker licenses does not. In some situations GPL is the better license – in other situations X11/MIT-license is better. It all depends on the situation.
Stop spreading fud about GPL – stop spreading fud about BSD and other weak licenses. They are all doing a great job – each license in it’s own way.
And pleeease… stop talking about the GPL being communistic… that’s nonsense and you know it. Stop all (religious) fanatism, one way or the other.
“And pleeease… stop talking about the GPL being communistic… that’s nonsense and you know it. Stop all (religious) fanatism, one way or the other.”
It is not communistic. It is socialistic. Almost everyone except Stallman himself admits that. Go read the works of Karl Marx and then tell me the GPL isn’t influenced by Marxism.
Did I miss Lumbergh making a fool of himself again? Oh well, I’m sure I’ll see him again anytime someone mentions the GPL or RMS in one of these threads…
Quote: “If a man who runs his own business doesn’t want to hire women, or black people, or white people, then no one has the right to force him to.”
Wrong. The best man/woman qualified for the job should get it, irrespective of race, colour, religion, sexuality, age etc. Laws a made to stop this type of discrimination, the problem is that it’s very hard to enforce, since employers choose who they want and lie thru their teeth to justify it. They do not openly admit that they have discriminated against a potential employee on a variety of areas.
AQ – kudos. You, alone out of many of the posters here, seem to understand the GPL and it’s reason of being. Your thoughts are 100% correct, you cannot help the blind people who do not wish to follow.
Why is a BSD style license bad? Microsoft can take BSD code, use it as a base for their own code, release it under a private EULA, from which you lose the rights that were originally endowed under the BSD license. If I want to use Microsoft and networking, i’m using a re-worked bsd stack. But i’m forced to agree to a Microsoft EULA. Which one is more restrictive? Thus I have proved that the BSD does not protect the rights of sub users, but encourages businesses to rape the collective works of others for their own greedy benefit, with no legal or moral onus on them to return to the community. The GPL enforces this.
Einstein once said that “I stand on the shoulders of giants”. Why did he say this? Whilst he was brilliant, he acknowledged that his work would have been impossible without the efforts of prior scientists like Sir Isaac Newton, Ptolemy etc etc. He recognisd the works of others. And he respected them. If we had a modern Einstein today, he’d be trying to patent the theory of relativity etc for his own monetary benefit, rather than science and the benefit of mankind as a whole. This does not improve society.
Society has gone to the dogs, and no longer encourages or respects freedoms. Minority groups are minority groups, and always been forcibly discriminated against. As an example (and admittedly this is OT, but i’m using it to illustrate my point) – i’m of a pagan religious belief. I see the many lies and wholes in the Christian religion. If I point that out, i’m committing heresy, and i’m “evil” and automatically deemed wrong – there’s a furore because i’ve spoken bad about the “church”. I’m then discriminated against by the Catholic church(es) because i’m pagan and don’t worship their idea of a “God”. All pagans are supposedly “devil worshipers”, something that the church is quite happy to spread. So – it’s OK for the church to discriminate against my religious beliefs, and promote intimidation and harrassment of myself, but not for me to point out the many flaws in the Christian religion. Hypocrisy? You bet. Discrimination? You bet. Equal rights in modern society? Not on your life. I didn’t see pagans killing six million women in the 14-15th centuries.
Dave
The best man/woman qualified for the job should get it, irrespective of race, colour, religion, sexuality, age etc.
“Should,” yes. But “should be forcibly guaranteed to”, no. If you think that the government has a right to force people to behave properly in this way, then I would like to know what you think the foundation for such a right is. My guess is that you will say the government simply gets it from the majority – great, welcome to a pure democracy, a form of government the US founders feared as much as they feared a king! I suppose the majority can choose to execute everyone over six feet tall, too. Four legs good, two legs better, eh?
Once again I agree with Anonymous (IP: —.wa.charter.com), especially regarding the ugliness of a dictatorship of the majority, something that should be plain scary to everybody who has understood Liberalism and the values at the very basis of western societies.
I want to add one thing:
>The best man/woman qualified for the job should get it
Sure, that’s exactly what I think. But when we’re talking of a *private* business, who’s supposed to judge who’s the better man/woman? My answer is: obviously, the entrepreneur. And without having to justify his choices to anybody, because he *owns* the business, and he has the *right* to lead his own business as he wishes.
Once again it shows that those who have such a big problem with proprietary software actually have a problem with the very concept of private property.
By the way ulib, I am fond of the GPL myself. I’m just also not opposed to proprietary software or to BSD-style software. I kind of get caught in the middle of the “BSD is truly free… no, GPL is truly free!” wars, because I know what they both mean and I see value in each kind of “free.”
I think there is a place for all kinds of software licenses:
I like the GPL because I don’t want to live in a world of all-proprietary software, because I think that sharing is often a great idea, and because there are benefits when the sharers stick together and create a valuable share-and-share-alike community. But I do see it as a license with an agenda. Whether that agenda is political, social, or otherwise is just semantics to me, and what the motivations or historical foundations for it were don’t matter to me either. It is what it is, and it does what it does, and those are the only things that should determine whether I use it.
I like proprietary software because I know that it drives development in areas that would otherwise lag behind, because sometimes throwing a whole boatload of money at a problem *is* the right solution, and because sometimes communities are bad at things that matter to software, like support and UI design. Proprietary licenses, however, also clearly have an agenda.
I like BSD software because sometimes the agendas of both GPL and proprietary software get in the way of things like interoperability, standards and ubiquity.
“The best man/woman qualified for the job should get it.”
Just to put some pressure on the notion that the government should be accomplishing this kind of equality by force, what do you think about this statement:
“The best restaurant should get your service.”
Let’s say that I want to eat out, but I’m a racist jerk who doesn’t like black people. There’s a place right on my block that has fine food at good prices. But it’s run by black people, so I always walk two blocks further to eat at Joe “Whitey” Smith’s diner. Should I be forced by the government to eat at the first place, since I would otherwise be discriminating in my business dealings based solely on race?
If yes, then I’m speechless. If not, well, I don’t see a distinction between choosing where to buy food and choosing where to buy employee time. It’s either my money or it isn’t. What I hear you saying is that it isn’t.
Fine – i’ll mug any catholics that I see. Only catholics. Jews, Buddhists, Islamists, Pagans are all fine. Just catholics. See how much trouble that’d cause. And see how far they’d jump up and down. Oh the cries of discrimination when i’m caught and admit to only targetting catholics.
Now – of course i’m *not* going to do this. Mugging someone, just isn’t right – period. But – it disproves your pathetic attempts at arguments, that it’s OK to discriminate. Discrimination is discrimination and must be abolished completely for us to move forward as a species.
I guess you still feel that it’s OK for some of the southern US states to discriminate against Negroes eh? I mean “it’s part of the south, so what’s wrong with it?” seems to be your attitude. Or the argument “i’ve got rights, so I can discriminate when, where and how I want, and stopping me from discriminating is breaching my civil liberties”. BULLSHIT. You ARE breaking the law by discriminating. Whether it’s avoiding a perfectly fine local restaurant because of the ethnic ownership, or denying someone who’s perfectly fine for a role because of their race, religion, sex etc.
Until man learns to stop being discriminatory against his fellow man, our society is going to suffer. You will get minorities committing mass murders. And you know what? Society absolutely deserves it. A time will come when the current society collapses and everything will turn to chaos. It’s only a matter of time, not if.
Dave
[the sound of me being speechless]
Well, my thoughts are more or less the same. The fact is, I like it very much when software comes with the source code available. Being a developer myself, I imagine one day I might feel like modifying it: and if that were to happen, I like to be able to *choose* if I want to release my code or not. So, it’s not that I don’t like the GPL: I definitely do (I prefer to use a GPL’d software than a proprietary one whenever I can). It’s simply that I like MIT/BSD licensed software much more, because I feel it grants me an extra freedom that I value very much.
What I’m very uncomfortable with is that GPL advocates are in fact the worst enemies of MIT/BSD software, because the very existence of such less restrictive licenses undermines their political agenda (which I’m simply not interested into, because *to me* it’s flat out absurd).
Oh, and after reading the latest posts, I think I’ll join in that being speechless thing.
In the US there are 200 million white people, and only 39 million black. If whites never wre forced to hire blacks, they wouldn’t, and a large part of our economy would be destroyed because we’d have a lot of people living in third world poverty, just as segregation created not too many decades ago. On top of that, you’d have a massive population of people turning to crime as a means to survive by which they’d have to attack those with money, the white population.
By guarenteeing that employers have to hire minorities, we have been able to spread money around all classes in a way that we could have a much more stable and fluid society. There will always be poor, but our poor don’t live in the third world poverty of much of Africa. Our poor actually have some mobility in this country.
I don’t like racists, so this conversation for me is over. I just found your position ridiculously ignorant of history and how blacks were treated under segregation. I hope that you are somehow reincarnated as a black child living through those segregation times.
About the bsd, it has undermined nothing that is the gpl, as anything that is bsd can be made gpl. According to any objective statistic, bsd hasn’t undermined anything, as looking at the percentage of projects on sourceforge and freshmeat would tell you. The gpl is the most popular license, and it isn’t losing ground to the bsd.
If you don’t think the bsd has political implications as well, then you are being very naive. Politics are the basis of the two licenses… as the both argue for different types of freedom, and freedom is a political subject. No reason to think you are above it by trying to pretend otherwise.
Forcing people to hire minorities are as bad as dicriminating minorities. And both options are illegal. It’s quite simple. If you positively discriminate one person you negatively discriminate another person. Discrimination – no matter positive og negative – is illegal. Period.
And hiring people because they are black is as bad as not hiring people because they’re black.
European Americans wouldn’t mind hiring african americans if both parts could trust the system (and each other). A lot has happened in the past and it’ll take some centuries before the wounds will be reasonably healed (just look as Europe – we still haven’t forgot our enemies from about 7 centuries ago and even further back in history).
Anyway – hiring black people or not has very little to do with BSD or GPL-licenses. Which are both free – the first one just doesn’t protect the rights granted by the license. That is fitting in some cases and in other cases unfitting.
The GPL protects the freedom all the way – sometimes this is very fitting – sometimes it’s not.
Perhaps, I’m just being pragmatic?
RE: David Pastern
> Why is a BSD style license bad? Microsoft can take BSD code,
> use it as a base for their own code, release it under a
> private EULA, from which you lose the rights that were
> originally endowed under the BSD license.
You still seem not to understand the BSDL. You don’t lose those rights. Go to the BSD site, grab the code, and do whatever you want with it. If you are so eager on having the code distributed under the GPL, get the code and distribute it under the GPL. Nobody stops you.
RE: AQ
> If you don’t think the bsd has political implications as
> well, then you are being very naive. Politics are the
> basis of the two licenses… as the both argue for
> different types of freedom, and freedom is a political
> subject. No reason to think you are above it by trying to
> pretend otherwise.
I don’t even think they argue for *different* types of freedom. The both try to conserve the academic spirit, since they both originate from the academic world (BSD project at Berkely vs. Stallman’s experience at the MIT, IIRC). The biggest difference between the two licenses, namely the possibility that a corporation takes the code and derives proprietary software from it, isn’t a difference at all as long as the software stays in the universities where “making proprietary software” is simply nonsense.
Since not the goal but only the methods are different, it is even more sad that there is real war between GPLers and BSDLers. (NOTE: There are some BSDLers who say “use the BSDL because it’s business-compatible”. I did not want to include those with my comments, as I simply don’t understand how one can think that way, so I cannot comment on them. They certainly don’t try to conserve the academic spirit in any way and I would truly consider them slaves to the business world.)