On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, rwh wrote: > Mike Miller wrote: > >> Open source has been doing great things for us. Maybe you haven't been >> around long enough to appreciate this. It's an entirely different >> software world now, largely because of the FOSS movement. I think the >> future of FOSS looks very bright. > > I've been writing code since the late '60's so I've seen most stuff go > by three or four times already :-) People had been donating software to > the 'cause' for quite some time before RMS published his Dr. Dobbs > article in '85. And trust me, I've been in enough development meetings > to know that wrapping code in a layer of political dogma and legal > ambiguity doesn't make it any easier to sell to management. Sorry that I guessed your age wrong. But do you disagree with my assertion about the current success and bright future of FOSS? >> I think it is better that code is not used at all than that it is used >> within a proprietary program that competes with a decent FOSS option. >> If it can't make it as FOSS, it isn't all that great and I am happy to >> see it die. > > I guess we'll have to disagree and each license our code as we see fit. Unless one of us can persuade the other. Here's an article on the superiority BSD license that includes a bunch of historical info: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html Midway through that document (Section 5) the author presents "some rules of thumb when using the GPL." The first one states "you cannot sell the software itself." But that is not true. From the GPL FAQ: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money? Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.) In "What a license cannot do" he makes claims about Mattel and Cygnus that are misleading. The Mattel case didn't get anywhere -- that was back in 2000 and cphack is still freely available on the 'net. If Cygnus "[took] over development of the FSF compiler tools," I think that is a good thing because it means that a company that might have historically made more money under a proprietary business model is instead contributing to a GPL code base. No one can really "take over" a GPL'd project. In Section 10 "BSD Advantages," the author writes about Apache as if Apache is distributed under the BSD license. It is not. In fact, the Apache license is quite similar to the GPL and might be compatible with GPL 3, if not GPL 2: http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html It seems to have nothing to do with the BSD license. In the end, the author of this article basically suggests that the sole advantage of the BSD license over the GPL is that the BSD license attracts developers who want to use a proprietary model of software development. In other words, the BSD license is best for those who would like to profit from your code without giving back any code to the developer community. What's good about that? Mike