On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 9:12 AM, Thomas Davie
Now I have fairly strong feelings about freedom of code and I everything I release is either under GPL or LGPL. What I like about those licenses is it protects freedom in a way that I think it should and it forces a sort of reciprocity which resonates very well with my selfishness. Re-licensing code under BSD is not something I'm willing to do without something that compensates for that reciprocity, and I can think of several kinds of compensation here but they all pretty much boil down to either fame or fortune. ;-)
Sorry, this isn't the most relevant comment to the discussion, but I thought I'd add my own thought re the gpl/lgpl. My personal feeling is that the point of open source is to allow people the freedom to do what they want with a piece of code. The GPL/LGPL go completely against this idea, in that they restrict what I can do with the code to only things that are similarly licensed.
I've seen this cause problems even in environments where there's no commercial gain to be had. Take for example the zfs file system. Sun have been kind enough to completely open source it. Unfortunately, linux users can never hope for stable version that works in the kernel, simply because the GPL stipulates that zfs must be relicensed to do so.
That's my 2p's worth on why I use the BSD license over the GPL. In short, the GPL does not promote freedom, it promotes restrictions, just not the restrictions we've grown to hate from most companies.
You are completely right, both that the comment is a bit off-topic and in point. It can be argued that the (L)GPL is restrictive. However, I fall on the side of "the freedom to take something free and make it proprietary is not a freedom worth protecting". Also, I'm a selfish bastard ;-) /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe