On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Rick Moen <r...@linuxmafia.com> wrote: > Quoting John Cowan (co...@mercury.ccil.org): [...] > My surmise is that the thing being referred to as '{sublicensing|relicensing} > of BSD works' is in fact stating the licensing for a derivative. > > A certain number of the BSD regulars remain deeply unhappy when those > works state copyleft requirements, even though they're perfectly happy > when derivatives of the same BSD works have proprietary licenses. Go > figure.
This makes sense to me. It seems to me that many people who license code under permissive licenses do so in the knowledge that there are pressures to push changes upstream. If upstream is permissive, there is therefore a chance of code being re-released under a permissive license later. Which means that you might be able to pull those changes into a proprietary project of your own that uses that code. Apache comes to mind as an example of a project that in its early days benefitted from proprietary changes that were later released under a permissive license. Sure, most proprietary changes won't be re-released. But if even a fraction of them are, that is development effort that you got for free. Many are happy for there to be free riders if they are confident that a certain number of people won't be free riders. However if someone downstream re-releases under a copyleft license, there is essentially no chance of changes downstream of that ever being re-released under a permissive license that can be reintegrated back into the original project. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss