On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:58:03 -0400, Sean Kelly <s...@invisibleduck.org>
wrote:
Georg Wrede wrote:
Seems BSD should be Our Way
If the attribution clause in the BSD license really does cover
application binaries built containing a BSD-licensed library then it's
pretty much not an option in most corporate environments. I've tried to
get corporate documentation and legal teams to agree with this in the
past and was unsuccessful, to say the least.
On Don's recommendation I've switched the Druntime license to use the
Boost license instead of BSD. It's about as permissive as possible
without making the code public domain, and doesn't have any of the weird
problems "public domain" licensed software seems to have both with US
corporate lawyer paranoia and countries abroad with no legal support for
"public domain" copyrights.
It's nice to see ESR coming around about the GPL though. I don't know
anyone that will go near GPL-licensed source code for exactly the
reasons he mentions.
Interesting anecdote: Our company developed a Linux driver to one piece
of hardware that our largest customer used. We did not release it under
GPL terms but this is OK legally since the kernel doesn't require GPL'd
drivers.
The customer had a problem with one of the stock open source drivers in
their OS. However, they couldn't get *any* support from the community
because the community wouldn't even bother looking at a kernel that was
"tainted" by a proprietary driver. So we were *forced* to relicense our
driver under GPL terms (this customer has a lot of clout), just so the
free software community would look at a problem completely unrelated to
our driver. They probably never even looked at the source in our driver.
This is the kind of mentality I think that completely goes against
progress, and it's fostered by the GPL. I'm not saying the GPL is
useless, but I see little to no value in a for-profit company using it
unless they are forced to. And there's this holier-than-thou attitude
from GPL supporters that completely sucks.
Anyway, I agree that the world could do just as good without GPL. Maybe
it was necessary in the beginning, but not any more.
-Steve
