Re: licensing

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Jeff Kinz wrote:

> Use GPL. BSD allows other parties to take the software private, and not
> share their changes. This enables parties like Microsoft to "embrace
> and extend" existing API's and standards creating a proprietary lock-in
> where none existed before.

BSD licenses also encourage reuse of good APIs and standards (many of
which have guided the direction of Unix and the internet).

> GPL prevents that from happening.

In other words, the GPL is not free.

> Real world experience shows us that GPL style licenses are much more
> successful than BSD licenses at producing large, successful communities
> of both developers and end-user's. For a project to succeed, both are
> needed.

Do you have any examples/citations that say GPL is more successful?

Even large components of Linux distributions are based on BSD-style
licenses.

XFree86 and Apache are two examples of very successful products and
communities that are based on BSD-type licenses. The X11/XFree86
licensing has encouraged the code to be embraced and extended.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.isp-faq.com/