> That depends on what your market is - for businesses who wants to be
> able to hide source, yes. For businesses who use it, being sure the
> source is available is the best - which the GPL guarantees. BSD gives
> the middle man more freedom to screw the end user ;)
Well, we all want more freedom, right? (please note sarcastic tone ;)
> > What we'd like to propose is a general tightening up of what the
> > existing license is *supposed* to be doing in the first place -
> > protecting the developers who worked on the code, and ensuring that
> > the code stays open source in perpetuity.
> GPL would solve this - the main advantage of BSDish licenses is you
> can go closed source if you want to.
I imagine that RH has extensive ongoing internal discussions of
licenses. Is there a "company opinion" that the main advantage of BSD is
that you can go closed source?
imho an advantage of BSD is that there is no question that you can use
the open source anywhere you want, at any time, mixed with any other
code you want. For some, that might be a "main advantage"; for others, a
"don't care". Can't really see it as a negative from my PoV.
> Now, I don't advocate a change in license - my main consern is "there
> are enough licenses in the world". I think the "each package one
> license" is a bad trend.
Me too. PostgreSQL has been distributed with a plain-vanilla BSD license
forever. We would like to keep it that way. But BSD doesn't say anything
about developers outside of the UC system, so in the long run we
probably need to do something to address that. And I don't know about
any BSD licenses or existing offshoots which do that (though I haven't
looked much beyond the packages I already know). istm that in most cases
"companies with lawyers" go for something much tighter and more
restrictive than BSD or the recently suggested modification.
Regards.
- Thomas
