From kragen@dnaco.net Sat Jul 18 23:29:02 1998 Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:29:01 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: clug cincinnati linux user group Subject: Re: Explaining licensing (again :). In-Reply-To: <19980718163429.63014@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 611 Status: O X-Status: > > Fair enough. Except that I meant 1d, not 4a. "no trade restrictions" > > is far from what I meant. > > I don't see how the BSD license keeps me from control of domination of > another. People can snarf up BSD code, and take total control of it and > dominate it so that no one has any personal freedoms with the software. Not too likely. They can dominate *their copy of it*, but that's about it. If they try to dominate the original software, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. (Unless nobody cares about it, of course, so they have the only copy that's left.) > > No, I mean free in the (1d) sense -- the BSD-licensed software is less > > subject to the control or domination of its author(s). Since the authors > > are not the software, they are "others". > > I disagree. You need to look at more than just the original authors. With > free software licensing, there can be many authors after the original ones. > After the initial authors, subsequent authors can remove personal freedoms > with BSD-style licensing. No, they can't. Sun made proprietary versions of X, but that doesn't make X less free. It just made Sun's version of X less free. I know RMS disagrees, and I know he's been through a lot of BSD-style licensing in his time. I don't disagree that there's a benefit to some parts of the GPL, but it is certainly not that it gives the users of the software more freedom. > > > As I pointed out in another thread a few days ago: The goal of the > > > BSD-style [2] licenses is to make software popular; the goal of the GPL is > > > to make software free (1d, 4a). > > > When I release software to the public domain or under an X-style license, > > it's because I want to make it free. > > But, in the case of BSD-style licenses, and the public domain, you don't > care if other people make it less free. That's what the GPL protects. Take, as an example, . It's in the public domain. No one can possibly make it any less free as long as I have it on my web site. If someone else puts a copy on their web site, then both sites have to go down for it to become any less free. If it becomes useful to anyone, it's unlikely that all the copies will ever be in the hands of proprietary-software folks. It's true that, for example, it could be incorporated into Fractint; the copy in Fractint would be less free, because then it can't be sold. But that's OK. The freedom to incorporate it into Fractint is important, and the freedom to sell the code is also important. Both of those freedoms exist with regard to my code. > Software was just free---because no one thought that > much about making source proprietary (e.g., AT&T handed the Unix source to > Berkeley!). Slowly, proprietary software began to happen, and that's why > the free software movement was conceived. That's a little inaccurate. There were some places where that was true, but IBM, CSC, Control Data, Cray, Burroughs, etc., had lots of proprietary source code. Kragen