Jose O Gonzalez wrote:
It's Friday, and I'm not doing any more coding, so I'll weigh in on this one :)I personally fail to understand the free-and-good-BSD vs political-and-bad-LGPL, stance of many here.The reality is that *any* recourse to a license, even a copyright, is taking a political stance - it is seeking protection through the legal framework via some scheme. To brand one such scheme as political but another as free of politics is illusory. I personally do not care much for any licensing schemes, and every piece of code I've ever put up here, meager as it's been, I've done so with no conditions whatever - I've not copyrighted anything, I've not licensed anything, I've not asked for my name to be added to any list of contributors, I've not asked for anything to be 'applied' or for 'access to cvs'... If others have the view that they would prefer their work to be protected under the legal framework afforded by use of copyright and/or a choice of license then that is something I very much respect. But villifying one license scheme as 'political' and blessing another as the one true 'apolitical' choice, is quite flawed.
I was somewhat surprised when I realised that all Enlightenment stuff is BSD.
The GPL license offers protection from predatory bodies - mainly corporations - from taking your code and building on it without giving those changes back. This seems like a good protection to me. The consensus here seems to be that the BSD license gives them the most freedom. That may be so, but it also offers no protection. Say for example Microsoft or Apple or some other company come along and lift your code, incorporating it in their next product, but adding a couple of thousand hours of work to it. They of course don't give anything back to the original authors. Wouldn't that worry people? Perhaps it would never happen, but then again perhaps it would.
The 'freedom' arguement also ignores the fact that people can dual-license their code. Why not negotiate a dual-license deal with developers so that the code that is released to the public is GPL, but the developers get offered a BSD-licensed copy?
Not being an Enlightenment developer at the moment ( Perl's the limit ... whatever happened to those Perl bindings, by the way ), I'm not particularly bothered either way. I suppose I'm more curious. Of course I respect the developers' choice to put whatever license they want on their code, but I'd like to hear more from people who have the time to respond why they see the BSD is better for them than the GPL - especially when there are options like dual-licensing.
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