Re: licensing

Jeff Kinz wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 09:21:44AM +0200, aslam wrote:
> 
>>Hi All,
>>
>>We in the South African government OSS workgroup have been discussing the adoption of an open source license for software the government creates. The GPL and BSD licenses have feautured the most in our discussions. It is appreciated that some projects might need special consideration in terms of licensing however we would like to recommend a default license for Government all things being equal. What does the list think ?
> 
> 
> Hi Aslam - please format your lines to 65 chars long (RFC-1855)
> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
> There is a setting in your outlook options for this.
> 
> RE: your question: 
> 
> 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.
> 
> GPL prevents that from happening.

This is *so wrong* on so many levels.

The example company you are using here - Microsoft - has generally shown 
little regard for *any* license being used and has grabbed code from 
*proprietory* software before as well.

Even the companies that *do* use BSD licensed software in their products 
give back to the community - i.e. Apple.


> 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.

No.  There are lots of large projects using each.  Linux - a GPL based 
project - is huge, but that doesn't necessarily mean the GPL is the 
driving factor of the community size, but instead it can mean that the 
particular software meets the needs of the community members better than 
the alternatives.  i.e. Same as normal market demands.


<snip>
> While any government security function probably has data they need to
> keep secret (I certainly hope they do!), the generalized software tools
> used to manipulate that data, like databases should be based on GPL
> software.

This definitely needs further discussion.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift