On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, T.J. Duchene wrote: > The GPL isn't perfect, and doesn't always fit the bill, so to speak. I guess if the bill is "I just want people to use it, I don't care if they give anything back," then BSD is better. > In a perfect world, everyone could use the GPL, but the corporate > culture and mindset is far from utopian - and the BSD license is a > reasonable compromise. BSD is a great choice if your goal is to help corporations, like Microsoft, to make more money. > If I have my choice, I'd pick the GPL over the BSD because the GPL > stipulates that you have to give something back. The BSD is very > practical, but changes don't have to be shared, and this leads to the > proprietary mindset most of us would rather avoid. Exactly. But isn't that the whole point of the GPL and FOSS? The idea of creating communities where code is shared is the core idea. BSD says that it is just fine to take and not give. In the end, that doesn't work out. Comparing BSD with GPL, I think GNU/Linux is doing much better than FreeBSD and it is partly because of the license. Microsoft and Apple can use the FreeBSD code and not give anything back, so FreeBSD is helping their competition without helping themselves. If there was no FreeBSD code inside of Windows and OS X, where would Linux be now? Much better off, I think. So I think BSD is not helping us. > The BSD crowd, though love to share ideas with everyone, as well as code > - much to their credit. There are those though (again, my opinion) who > abuse their work, by making derivatives solely proprietary. It isn't really abuse because BSD is saying that they want it that way. Mike