On 9/1/07, David H. Lynch Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > FSF/GPL licenses grant you the freedom to do almost anything EXCEPT > convert GPL'd code to proprietary code. > > BSD/ISC Licenses claim to be "Totally Free" - specifically because > you can convert the code to proprietary code.
You could not be more wrong, I think. Seems to me the BSD license is designed precisely to prevent this. Granting of rights != transfer of ownership. You can _use_ BSD-licensed code in a proprietary product; that does not mean you have a proprietary claim on the BSD-licensed code. That's the point of requiring that the copyright/license notice be retained. There is no "conversion to proprietary code" here. In this respect GPL and BSD are in complete agreement. The difference is in the obligations they impose on the licensee regarding use. BSD imposes one simple negative condition - you /must not/ remove the license. GPL imposes a more complex set of positive conditions - you /must/ make alterations available under the same license. In neither case does ownership enter the picture. Copyright law goes back centuries, contract law goes back to the Romans. There's more than meets the eye there; "common sense" interpretations uninformed by some degree of awareness of the legal traditions - as in, "I don't see anything in there that says I can't do X" is almost certain to be wrong. IANAL, though. Talk to one of them if you really have a burning desire to understand all this. Even then, only the courts can settle the matter. -Gregg
