Comments on: BSD or GPL: Choosing an open source license

By: Bookmarks for July 11th « crncosta

Bookmarks for July 11th « crncosta — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:48:42 +0000

[...] BSD or GPL: Choosing an open source license – If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. This link describe the difference between this two important licenses using a neutral opinion. This entry was written by Carlos Costa and posted on July 11, 2008 at 3:34 pm and filed under en_US. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Bookmarks for July 8th Artigo na PCMaster » [...]

By: Rui Miguel Silva Seabra

Rui Miguel Silva Seabra — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:20:40 +0000

So a guy who practically only knows Microsoft technologies misunderstands licenses that are diametrically opposed to anything he’s used to deal with… and? Does the world end?

Of course with such misunderstandings it is very hard for someone to make a good choice.

Sudhir, I recommend you to read many of the Free Software essays at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/

Some of your extremely basic misconceptions:

* attribution
WTF? The first lines of the BSD claim you must give attribution. Did you read the BSD license or did you just trust someone’s word at Microsoft?

* commercial vs proprietary
You don’t know the difference, and this creates absurd statements. Both the GNU GPL and BSD allow commercial usage, it’s only proprietary usage that is forbidden by the GPL

Finally, you can look at the GNU GPL as a Universal Bill of Rights of All Software Users

One of the most important tasks of a Bill of Rights is making sure nobody has more power over others, so the GNU GPL establishes a level playing field for all users (regardless of them being also developers or not).

By: Jack Ripoff

Jack Ripoff — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:17:47 +0000

“When using a BSD license, a company (or a person) can take your code and use it in their own commercial or non-commercial products, and isn’t required to give you credit or compensation for your work.”

This is a common misconception about permissive copyright licenses, even though all of them state:

“Provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.”

So this is actually the only common requirement among permissive licenses: they request that the original author be given credit for their work.

Just run “strings.exe” in the Windows binaries and you will see the original BSD TCP/IP stack copyright statement.

By: C. Conrad Cady

C. Conrad Cady — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:55:31 +0000

>> The BSD license is a permissive license, allowing more freedoms to the users who wish to use your work in their programs.

I think it would be clearer to use the term “developers”, rather than “users.”

By: DataMan

DataMan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:17:03 +0000

Cedega was forked from Wine before Wine was licensed under LGPL so they do not have to provide ANYTHING to the Wine code, although they promised to push any improvements upstream to Wine community but they provide VERY LITTLE if any.

By: web design

web design — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:33:48 +0000

They both basically try to preserve freedom. The BSD style licenses give the most freedom to the indivudual, whereas the GPL gives the most freedom to the community as a whole.

By: mario

mario — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:17:27 +0000

I also want to weight in regarding the credit part. The sole and only thing the BSD license does is requiring to give credit.

The GNU GPL on the other hand, does NOT enforce giving credit. It enforces eternal availability of the source code.
That the authors copyright notice gets preserved is a byproduct of most local copyright laws. The GNU GPL doesn’t take care of that.

By: Thomas Hurst

Thomas Hurst — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:19:05 +0000

“BSD Answer: When using a BSD license, a company (or a person) can take your code and … isn’t required to give you credit”

Wait, what? You sure do have to give me credit for my BSD licensed work:

“The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

By: Jasper

Jasper — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:28:32 +0000

[not legal advice, check it]
Note that if _all_ contributers _ever_ to a GPL project agree to it,(Handy if you are the sole creator.) you may spread copies with another license. This does not invalidate the license requirement of the versions of already distributed under the GPL, though.
So in principle you can ask for a buck if they want your source, and still help the free software community. Of course, this prevents you from accepting edits from other persons, who will demand to keep it GPL. Or at least get a share of the profit, and then the problem becomes, how much. I wouldnt do that unless that is very clear.