

In defense of BSD licenses (response to Zed Shaw) - fogus
http://pwang.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/in-defense-of-bsd-licenses-response-to-zed-shaw/

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embeddedradical
if you are trying to make money through dual licensing, GPL is a better route
because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the
commercial license in order to make their products commercial. This is not
true of BSD licenses, and commercial entities can use your software anyway (OS
X).

I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I
give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's
going to be free, it should be completely free.

Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all
software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was
dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant
philosophical/political change _just in the software industry_ appears naive.

If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical
reason to go with GPL rather than BSD), it should be addressed as a whole:
looking at it in sciences, software, literature, all of it -- for if it is
true that we don't need it, or are hampered by it, I don't see how it only
applies to software. I'm far more concerned that companies are patenting found
genetics than I am that this stupid iphone which erased all my music this
morning because I had recently formatted and it thinks it was synced to
another computer, and how the new firmware breaks it from musicmonkey again,
and now I can't transfer my flac files, and have to use their junky itunes
instead -- yah it sucks, but the genetic stuff is even more troublesome -
philosophically.

~~~
jmillikin
_I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when
I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's
going to be free, it should be completely free._

Free to whom? If you want developers to retain all the rights, there's already
a license for that -- "all rights reserved". If you want users to have rights,
then the GPL is the best choice.

 _Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that
all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was
dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant
philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive._

So because something wildly improbably and likely harmful won't happen, you
refuse to use the GPL? Perhaps you don't recognize how bizarre your argument
is, so lets apply it to a different situation: _Maybe if I thought bicycling
stood a chance to ever make it so that all transportation, or at least the
majority, was human-powered and long-distance travel was dead...then I would
use it_.

 _If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical
reason to go with GPL rather than BSD)_

Nonsense. If somebody doesn't care about copyrights _at all_ , they would
release their software into the public domain. Obviously this is an uncommon
choice.

The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses,
is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use.

~~~
petercooper
_The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses,
is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use._

What rights do software users benefit from with GPL licensed software that
they do not with BSD licensed software?

You seem to make the point a couple of times that the GPL is more free and
gives more rights to _users_.. could you elaborate on that as, to how I see it
currently, little is more free than the BSD license except the public domain.
The GPL places all sorts of restrictions on users if they choose to modify the
software.

~~~
boucher
You're confused about who the user is in this discussion.

The user is the end user of software, not the developer who is using your
code. GPL protects the rights of end users, no matter how many developers sit
in between the original code and the end user.

In other words, as an end user, if I'm using a GPL program, I _know_ that I
can access the source code and fix anything I need to or change anything that
needs changing.

To be as specific as possible, in what I described, you don't count as a
developer until you actually take your changes and give them to someone else,
so distributor may be a more accurate term.

------
tspiteri
The BSD license allows someone to take the code, improve it, and not share the
improvements, which may sometimes lead to fragmentation. This happened in the
Wine project, where some companies used the free Wine code and added closed
improvements. Improvements to Wine were merged to the closed product, but
improvements to the closed product could not be used by Wine. The licence of
Wine was changed to the LGPL to stop this.

------
koenbok
As a small Mac developer, I respect the GPL, but I don't always get it.

For example we created a GUI subversion client for the Mac that is pretty
popular. I'm sure that it gave subversion usage on the Mac a boost as now more
people can actually use it (half of our customers are not programmers). So our
application actually stimulates the usage of subversion, which can't be bad
for anyone involved.

We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but
the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or
make an open source communication library. Now, if the GPL GUI applications
were as great as the commercial ones, there wouldn't be a problem. But for
reasons I'm not sure about that doesn't seem to be the case.

~~~
nailer
> We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client,
> but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line
> or make an open source communication library.

Couldn't you re-implement the GIT spec (including making such a spec if it
does not exist now)?

~~~
inklesspen
Incidentally, that is how github works, if I'm not mistaken; the 'grit'
library (<http://github.com/schacon/grit>) does as much as possible in pure
ruby, falling back to command-line if necessary.

It's also licensed under the MIT license, so you could use it in your Cocoa
app using MacRuby or whatever.

------
profquail
I've done a little bit of open source work (a few small numerics libraries and
the beginning of a small project in PHP) and I always release my stuff under
the BSD license. To me, the GPL just doesn't seem 'free' (to reiterate what
embeddedradical said earlier).

All of the stuff I've written has just been to fill a small hobby and because
the only offerings out there were all expensive non-free libraries that I
couldn't afford to pay for (not for a hobby, anyway).

I seem to remember that the very bottom of the networking stack in Windows was
(and may still currently be) based on a BSD sockets implementation. If
Microsoft had implemented their own methods from scratch, who's to say that
things would be as compatible as they are now?

I respect that some authors want recognition (or perhaps a job) as a result of
the hard work they put in (for free) on a lot of open source projects. But I
think software is much more useful under a license that allows people to do
whatever they want with it, commercial or otherwise.

------
artificer
Every once in a while that a similar license discussion emerges, I see a clear
pattern:

Many,many people do not understand the GPL.

In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've
read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases.

This leads to

a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler
license, such as BSD.

b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this
situation.

------
tptacek
_The fact that Zed wrote Mongrel and got no recognition is possibly an
indictment of several things: the RoR buzzstorm, the Rails community, the “OMG
Ruby is the new Java for Web 2.0″ technorati, maybe even venture capitalists.
But it is not an indictment of the BSD license._

Here's where I stopped reading.

~~~
andreyf
Could you expound why? I had a boss who hadn't written a line of code in his
life ask me if we were using RoR around 2006...

Edit: what I mean to say is that the author is correct that there was a lot of
baseless Ruby fanboyism.

~~~
tptacek
And?

Short answer: because life's too short to read an essay about software
licensing that appears to be shot through with commentary about the failings
of the Ruby/Rails community. Am I wrong, and there was no RoR commentary after
that graf? Oh well.

~~~
pwang
Yes, you are wrong. I wrote nothing further about Rails after that. In fact,
the only reason I brought up Rails in the first place was to acknowledge Zed's
animosity towards that community.

~~~
tptacek
Poorly played.

