
Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project  - pooriaazimi
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html
======
naner
_The GPL is a complex license so here are some rules of thumb when using the
GPL:_

 _you can charge as much as you want for distributing, supporting, or
documenting the software, but you cannot sell the software itself._

I don't believe this is correct. You can sell the software.

~~~
ams6110
Yes I think you can sell the software but you must make the source available.
I'm not sure how this is different from charging for distribution, from a
practical standpoint.

~~~
dwrowe
Make the source available to the purchaser, not necessarily public I think,
right?

~~~
chousuke
IANAL, but my understanding is that anyone who obtains a GPL'd binary is
entitled to receive the source as well, from the source that provided them
with the binary.

If you are careful with who you distribute the binary to, you could in theory
keep the source sort of "secret", though I don't think it's a good general
approach to GPL software.

~~~
mkup
And after receiving that "secret" source the customer can just upload it to
its website and give away to the world for free.

------
slowpoke
I believe that a BSD-style license is generally good (personally I even prefer
the WTFPL). In an ideal world, we wouldn't need licenses because nobody would
be stupid enough to make proprietary software[1] or otherwise try to restrict
the user's freedoms. We'd pretty much have implicit CC-BY or -Zero for
everything and be done with it.

For now, we need the GPL to _force_ change. BSD-style does not slowly force
the ever-stuck-in-the-past industry to stop making inferior unfree[2]
software. It will not prevent the same people from leeching off the efforts of
the FLOSS community without giving anything in return (or even trying to
sabotage our efforts with patents or similar nonsense).

[1] Yes, proprietary software is and always was an enormously stupid idea,
probably up there with patents and copyright on the list of _Most Ridiculous
Bullshit In Human History_.

[2] Free as in Speech.

~~~
jasonlotito
Your comment is a good one. People are downvoting not because you aren't
contributing, but because they disagree with you and are trying to silence
your opinion. They forget that upvotes should be used to encourage discussion,
and down votes used to remove comments that don't contribute. Hopefully,
posting here will highlight your comment so others will take note.

~~~
phaylon
It might also be that "in an ideal world nobody would be stupid enough," "an
enormously stupid idea" and "most ridiculous bullshit in human history" aren't
really arguments, and thus not really further the conversation.

~~~
jasonlotito
That ignores the rest of the comment. So yes, if you ignore the comment as a
whole, and choose to pick out specific parts of the comment, you can claim the
entire comment worthless. But I disagree with that approach. With that
approach, you've essentially become no better than someone who down votes
someone for making a spelling mistake.

~~~
phaylon
In my mind there's a huge difference between spelling _mistakes_, and
_purposefully_ setting up a negative and insulting tone. There's no need to
ignore the rest of the comment, when you think the overall language will do
more harm than good.

I can accept that you find the language used to make a point not that
important, but you should consider that not everyone might agree with that.

------
tytso
What this essay (from 2008) fails to point out as an advantage is that the GPL
requirements have forced many device drivers to be released as open source.
And hardware support is critical for an operating system's viability.

If a project is releasing frequently and often, such as the X Windows system
did in the early days, and people want the features in the new releases, the
overhead in constantly forward porting private, proprietary enhancements
(whether they be I18N support or driver support) tends to encourage people who
might be tempted to keep code to themselves to contribute it back to the
mainstream codebase. But if the project releases too slowly, or tries too hard
to keep internal API backwards compatibility, it can cause people to fail to
contribute their changes back, and then the open side of the project
stagnates.

This is something that Charles Hannum, one of the NetBSD founders, eventually
realized:

<http://onlamp.com/bsd/2006/09/14/netbsd_future.html>

In fact, he observed that a non-copyleft license tends to encourage
fragmentation, and what do we see happening with Android? With a GPL license,
things like Touchwiz would be have to be released as source code. (Of course,
with a GPL license, there's a chance handset manufacturers would have been
scared off, which is why apparently Andy Rubin very early chose Apache
instead. Personally, I don't believe that to be true, given that Android did
use the Linux kernel, which was GPL'ed. But, he was the startup founder, and
he didn't want to take that chance with his baby, which is totally
understandable.)

~~~
diminish
I have some libraries on github with MIT and GPL licenses, I will release a
major software soon. I am still not certain which one is the best license for
my purposes:

-I want everyone to freely use and distribute it, if they are contributing back their source code to the me or the community.

\- Except, I don't want my code to be used by patent-abusers/suers and their
platforms (especially the patent war-lord Apple irritates me). I don't want
them to suck my code like a black hole and avoid giving their code back to the
community.

Would BSD/MIT or Apache or any variation of them help me in this case? Does
GPL really help?

~~~
krzysz00
I don't think the BSD/MIT licenses will stop the patent-abusers from using
your code because (as I understand them) they say "Here's the code, do
whatever you want with it. Just keep the copyright notice on."

If you want to stop your code from being sucked into a black hole, a more
"restrictive" license like the GPL would be your best bet. I would recommend
the GPL because it's well-known and a lot of people have some idea of what the
terms are, as opposed to something like the Apache license, which people might
have to look up.

------
sc68cal
_The GPL explicitly disallows revoking the license. It has occurred , however,
that a company (Mattel) purchased a GPL copyright (cphack), revoked the entire
copyright, went to court, and prevailed [1]_

This may not be entirely accurate.

Background: <http://tbtf.com/resource/cphack-history.html>

Original slashdot comment:
[http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4703&cid=1162803](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4703&cid=1162803)

Archive of one of the authors answering if cphack was GPL:
[http://web.archive.org/web/200102042331/http://www.islandnet...](http://web.archive.org/web/200102042331/http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/cpbfaq.html#gpl)

~~~
jeremysalwen
Sort of off topic but the authors response is a bit insane.

>"The origin of the confusion is that in one source file in cphack (note that
cphack is just one of the four main items in the cp4break package), there's a
comment saying "Released under the GPL". There is also a similar statement in
the onscreen "About" box."

But previously: "The suggestion that it might have been GPL surprised Eddy and
I just as much as it did anyone else"

Really? They think that the suggestion that a piece of software which says
"Released under the GPL" in the source code and similar things in the about
box is in fact released under the GPL is surprising?

Then it goes on: "I think that doesn't mean much because saying "the GPL"
doesn't really identify "the GNU General Public License version 2" as
specifically as a copyright notice should."

A very strange argument. Are they really claiming that the author purposely
wrote that it was released under "the GPL", but was referring to a _different_
GPL (and never mentioned it)? Or is he trying to say that by keeping the
language ambiguous, he can retroactively change the intention?

I'm not sure whether to interpret all this as ineptitude, stubbornness or
deception.

Look, it is quite clear that they did not release it under the GPL, I'm not
contesting that. But what they're claiming is quite ridiculous, and I feel
like there must be more going than what they're writing.

------
jgfu
According to some Apache is better:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40100/apache-licence-
vs-b...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40100/apache-licence-vs-bsd-vs-
mit)

I think it is too wordy though, and for 99% of projects, the MIT vs BSD vs
Apache difference is not terribly important, so why weight your project down
with a crazy big license?

I prefer MIT. It's a little clearer to me, and is claimed to be GNU GPL
compatible.

~~~
SeanLuke
Do _not_ use MIT (or BSD).

MIT has a killer failing: it was developed prior to the onset of software
patents, and so has no patent release. This dooms it to being appropriate for
only trivial projects. It doesn't matter if _you_ think there's nothing
patentable in your code: others don't know that. If you want people to use
your code in this day and age, a patent release is critically important.

Use Apache. Why be concerned about license length? Include the license once
and then refer to it in your source copies. No big deal.

~~~
dpcan
Can you explain what a "patent release" is?

~~~
tingletech
BSD is basically just granting a copyright license. Apache grants you a right
to use any patents the code may use.

Where I work contracts and grants prefers that we use BSD because they (as I
understand it) think apache's patent grants are too broad.

Contracts and grants prefers we use Education Community License over apache
<http://www.educause.edu/wiki/Educational+Community+License>

------
jonpaul
I typically choose MIT; I'd like to see a comparison of BSD vs MIT/Apache.

~~~
rbanffy
Please see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3402450>

------
gioele
If ( _if_ ) you want to go BSD or MIT, why don't you go with the simpler and
more honest public domain, UNLICENSE [1] or CC0 instead?

Releasing software as UNLICENSE or CC0 has the same consequences of releasing
it as BSD but it conveys a much stronger point.

[1] <http://unlicense.org> cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NQW6BVB...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NQW6BVBMQe4J:unlicense.org/+unlicense&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=ubuntu)

