Subject: Re: Another reason to go GPL
From: Matthew Keller (kellermg@potsdam.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 19:13:21 EST
On 2001.03.27 16:57:07 -0500 "Bruce A. Burdick, Jr." wrote:
> GPL effectively eliminates ownership through progressively entangling
> obligations on the part of the coders. BSD provides a form of shared
> ownership, in which the codebase may be forked freely as needed and
> participating developers each retain full discretion regarding the
> disposition of their work -- public or private.
Your e-mail is mostly right-on. I will, however, take issues with
your statement that the "participating developers each retain full
discretion" with BSD-licensed code. I have written number BSD-licensed
programs and applications that snippets or full code trees were taken, and
merged into quite famous works, with nothing my name embedded in the
binaries if you do a "strings" command on them. The BSD license does not
protect the developers, or the code. It allows either to be used as anyone
sees fit. Yes, this is the extreme of freedom, which some people
like/enjoy/want (and I do as well for certain projects), but to claim that
the BSD license gives the developers ANY discretion regarding the code is a
fallacy.
NOTE: This discussion began on the netatalk-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
list - And seems to have started being cross-posted recently onto
netatalk-admins@umich.edu. I *HIGHLY* recommend that those on
netatalk-admins who are interested in further discussing this, join the
netalk-devel list (and read the archives). There has been a lot said about
this already, and I for one don't want to have to rehash all of that for a
new list.
-- Matthew Keller Enterprise System Analyst Computing & Technology Services Information Services Division State University of NY at Potsdam
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