On 8/8/05 7:37 PM, "Kyle Wheeler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Friday, August 5 at 02:11 PM, quoth Bob Van Zant: >> I certainly like the FreeBSD license. Can't get much more open than that. No >> one is forced to give back their modifications under any circumstances which >> makes a whole lot of sense. > > Makes a whole lot of sense in what respect? As I think I made clear in my last email it makes sense in that no corporate entity thinks it's a good idea to give away the software they develop (regardless of the building blocks from which they started). Certainly RedHat and others have made a business out of this but does that mean they would have done the same thing if the open source software they leveraged had been licensed differently? I don't think any of us can answer this. Recall also that RedHat started out as an entirely free OS. It was later (and I have no idea whether it was the plan all along) that they turned in to a for-profit company offering support services. > >> The company I work for takes advantage of a lot of open source >> software and although it doesn't make any business sense to give back >> all of our changes to the open source world we do give back a lot of >> bug fixes and minor enhancements. > > That's cool. Out of curiosity, what sorts of projects has your company > contributed to? We have committers from FreeBSD and Python. We have committers from the Aquarium web app framework. We also hired the majority of the lead developers from a very popular open source project. We contribute to all of these projects on a regular basis. > >> We won't even look at GPL software. > > Because you fear it, or...? I'm trying to understand the logic (or maybe > just the mentality). Don't get me wrong here. I love the concept of open source software. I contribute to projects where ever I can as does the company I work for. However, in response to Andreas' initial request in this thread I feel that corporations are more likely to use (and thus contribute) to software that is BSD licensed instead of GPLed. If you want to argue that point, feel free, I'm open to your opinion. -Bob
