Mike Miller wrote: > On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Justin Krejci wrote: > >>> The only guy I know and talked to uses BSD as the base for their >>> products (and this is not a small embedded company) *exactly* because >>> of the GPL and license requirements to distribute source code. >> Yup, BSD based is the way to go. > > Not for the individual licensing his code, but for the individual who > wishes to use code written by someone else. If you want to contribute > something to the world, you definitely should not choose BSD for your > license. The GPL will do much better in promoting the software and > leading to further development. > Hey Mike, That seems a bit simplistic. How many places/projects do you think might want to use GPL but don't care to participate in the legal vagarities revolving around GPL? If I license a commercial library I pay cash and agree to restrictions on distribution. If I go the GPL route I don't pay cash but I do have to buy into the social goals of the GPL and accept some uncertaintly about IP liability. If I go the BSD route I only have to accept some uncertainty about IP liability. I 'grew' up during the days of the Apple II and CP/M and a lot of us just put code out there in the public domain. So I have no problem with the BSD approach. I've also worked on projects where a commercial license was preferable and some where GPL was fine. I'm a bit surprised by your comment. I doubt there are any restrictions on your published papers that would prevent me from extending what you've done (in principle anyway, practice is a different matter) and using it in a strictly commercial setting. That is essentially what the BSD folks are doing. Two small corrections to some of the stuff I've seen flying by in this thread. The code most people are referring to when they talk about MS using 'BSD' code is the network stack. As I recall this predates either GPL or BSD licenses. I believe it was put into the public domain as a result of AT&T's failed suit against the UCal Board of Regents distribution of the original BSD code which was based on AT&T's Unix code. It was also my impression that Apple's OS X was based on the same BSD licensed by NeXT from Berkeley rather than FreeBSD, although parts of OS X were ported from FreeBSD. I'm also pretty sure that Apple had been posting back enhancements to FreeBSD - Wikipedia mentions the Base Security Module being ported back from Apple's implimentation. They were also contributing patches and features from Safari back to KDE's Konqueror - at least until there was some conflict in priorities between Apple and the KDE folks. MS is another story, but really, do you want them contributing to the code base :-) --rick