[9fans] The new ridiculous license

["A. Baker" <boojum_42@yahoo.com>]

FYI

http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-1023765.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed

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(c|net's Stephen Shankland)

Do you ever wish you'd opted for a BSD-style license
instead of the General Public License (GPL)? (Unlike
the GPL, BSD-style licenses such as those used for the
Apache Software Foundation Web server and the FreeBSD
Unix offshoot permit open-source code to be made
proprietary.)

(Linux's Linus Torvalds)

Absolutely not. I personally think that the BSD
license is a dead end for serious projects, since it
inevitably results in forking with no way to re-join
if it becomes commercially viable. (Editors' note:
Forking is dividing a programming project into two
different, overlapping projects.)

Forking a project is in my opinion hugely important,
since forks are how all real development gets done,
and the ability to fork keeps everybody honest (i.e.
if you don't do a good job and keep your users happy,
they can always fork the project and go on their own).
But equally important is the ability to join back
forks, when/if some group finds the right solution to
a problem. And that's where the GPL comes in: you can
really think of the whole license as nothing more than
a requirement to be able to re-join a forked project
from either side.

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Ouch!


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Boojum

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