Dear Bruce: I just read your article here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html Midway through that document (Section 5) you present "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" you make 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 -- it is just a fork, and if it is a good fork it may become predominant, but that is not a "take over." In the end, you basically suggest 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 our code without giving back any code to the developer community. What's good about that? That clearly is the core issue. Couldn't you have left off nearly everything else and just told the reader why he should want his code to be used in proprietary software projects that compete with open source projects? Regards, Mike -- Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Division of Epidemiology and Community Health and Institute of Human Genetics University of Minnesota http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/