On Friday, 14 October 2005, at 01:17:02 (-0400), Jose O Gonzalez wrote: > 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.
The point is not whether or not there are politics. The point is that the BSD license is more free and less restrictive. > 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'... Anything you write is copyrighted. Whether or not you implicitly assign copyright to the original author(s) when you submit a patch or block of code is a matter of much debate. > But villifying one license scheme as 'political' and blessing > another as the one true 'apolitical' choice, is quite flawed. The GPL is designed around the political views of GNU and RMS. The BSD license basically says, "We don't care what you do with this as long as you give us credit." The only thing that's more free than that is "public domain." So as licenses go, BSD is pretty much as apolitical as you can get. > If indeed there are those who care about "choice" above all, then > either place no constraints on your work, or allow for a choice of > licensing schemes - allow for the work to be licensed under a number > of licenses that are commonly used: BSD, GPL, XYZ, ... It doesn't work that way. Licenses grant specific rights and restrict others. GPL'd code cannot be used in BSD-licensed projects. On Friday, 14 October 2005, at 16:07:33 (+1000), Dan wrote: > 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? Nope. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen regardless. If someone like Microsoft or AOL wanted to steal our code, they could do it easily, even if we used the GPL. And the chances of our being able to prove they did so are almost non-existent. > 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? In the end, the users are the ones who wind up with it. And since it's GPL'd for them, the conflict remains. BSD gives developers the right to use our code in any project under any license, including the GPL. The only thing they can't do is claim they wrote it. On Friday, 14 October 2005, at 15:58:22 (+0900), Carsten Haitzler wrote: > so... after a bit of length there - thats the reason i have used bsd > licenses, and almost all of the core develoeprs agree with such > licenses as being the way to go - we may simply think alike on the > topic, but that is one thing that definitely binds us all together. Every now and again someone comes along and wants to GPL something. And sooner or later these projects tend to move out into their own separate SF projects and CVS trees because their code is useless to us. Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> n + 1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/ Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Map out your future, but do it in pencil." -- Jon Bon Jovi ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
