MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-10-02 |
| FROM | David Sugar
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] OpenBSD used in MS Services for Unix 3.0
|
Generally my experiance has been that there are primarly two groups who use
BSD style licensing. The first group genuinely believe in software freedom,
sometimes to the point that they may view the act of protecting freedom
itself an infringement on freedom. I can generally empathize with that
viewpoint, as it is one I at one time also held. There are also plenty of
things where a BSD style license or even simpler statement that X may be
freely redistributed and modified, may well be an efficient expediant because
they either depend on other things (presumably freely licensed) that make
them useless stand-alone (a Makefile in a free software package for
example...), because the X in question is fairly trivial and routine (routine
shell scripts), or because the potential loss is no loss or larger danger
software freedom (for example, a generic unix "cp" program).
I am not in that sense at all against the ethical use of BSD licensing, but I
do not find it appropriate for many situations where real freedom is put at
risk (Kerberos for example). That said, I think the ethical BSD licenser
generally needs education. Unfortunately all too often it comes at the hands
of a preditory interest.
There is, of course, a second group that I have observed use BSD licensing.
This group is not ethical, but does so to encourage others to work on their
projects so that they could then fork off and sell proprietary branches. I
think some of the people at the origin of BSD itself thought this way, and
that group went off to form the proprietary BSDi system. However, I have
little direct knowledge about the Free/net/open/???-BSD[i] explosion.
I have observed that BSD-like licenses seems to encourage forks. Certainly
they can and do generate proprietary ones. Forking itself (assuming both
forks remain free) is not bad, since it's a software freedom being exercised,
but I have noticed that in copylefted free software forks tend to be shallow
and/or of short duration. Certainly if any branch explores an interesting
new idea, it can of course appear in another's fork fairly quickly. Perhaps
the GNU GPL instills greater social values, since I have observed far more
often than not forks occur do to individual conflicts rather than profound
technical insights or genuine differences in design philosophy. I expect
Richard has far better insight as to why forks are rare in GNU packages.
I remember last year when I went to EuroBSD, when I shared my views on
copyleft and BSD licensing strategies during my presentation. I did not find
anyone shocked by or hostile to my views. I believe there is considerable
value to be found in communicating our views with the BSD community and
others who may use BSD-like free software licensing strategies.
On Thursday 02 October 2003 12:23 am, Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS wrote:
> That sounds like a great peice for the NYLXS Journal :)
>
> Ruben
>
> On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 10:54:45AM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > I have gotten mail from BSD license users before with the tone
> > "so-and-so is making commercial use of my software, and returning
> > nothing, and I don't like it, but I guess it's my fault for using
> > BSD".
> >
> > I wonder if some of them could be convinced to write articles
> > about this subject. Want to ask them?
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