Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Bob Beck [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
It depends on your point of view and goals. - if your goals are to ensure your code is not easily usable in a corporate environment, then you want the GPL. If you want companies to be able to develop products based on your code and sell them withough giving away source then you want a BSD type license.
I know many corporations using GPL'd software with no trouble at all. I don't think that's a fair statement of the situation.
Why on earth would a company that uses BSD code fork it when they can get you, the original developer, to maintain it for free?
Because the decision-makers at said companies are morons? Don't tell me you think this never happens...
The biggest lie out of the GPL camp is that the BSD license lets companies "steal" software. In reality, when a company uses BSD software they quickly find out that if they add a bunch of extra stuff to it and -don't- make the source available, that when development of the BSD source continues to move onward, that it creates a nightmare of trying to integrate "their" changes to the ongoing BSD software.
Sometimes the fact that the main source moves onward is irrelevant. If Revision X of a package does what they need, they can take it and never look back. This has happened quite often; it's no GPL-sponsored lie.
The biggest software thief on the face of the Earth is Microsoft and they -LIKE- the BSD license, they even released a reference of c# coded for FreeBSD under the BSD license. However they don't use BSD code in their own stuff for the very reason I just cited - they don't want to share -their- code and they know that it isn't maintainable to modify BSD code and not feed the changes back to the common source tree.
I think Winsock is an obvious counter-example - it is clearly BSD-derived, and they have no problems modifying it and staying far away from the original source tree.
You need to let reality puncture the RMS pipedream you've been sucking down with regards to the BSD license compared to the GPL. Anyone who writes and sings a theme song for a software license is certifyable.
Uh huh. -- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/ ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List openssl-dev@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
