[Simh] Pontus asks Is [the] BSD [license] liberal enough?

[Clem Cole]

​Without getting into the good/bad politics of the different license its
pretty simple.  There are two styles and related to what happens with any
work that done later.

BSD/MIT/CMU et use what was sometimes called the "dead fish license."  This
was the traditional license that the computer industry was built on, taking
things from research, enhancing it and sometimes creatung products.    The
license says you can do anything you want with it (make a computer, wrap
dead fish or whatever) - you just have state that the original of
technology was X and have to leave there copyright and license in the
header (if you look at documentation from DEC/HP/IBM etc.. you will usually
see a long list of copyrights in the first page of the docs to satisfy the
license).

The key feature of this style of license is that any "derivitive work" is
yours and you can do you want with it.   This is the perfered license by
people that do not want/can not handle the issues that GPL adds.

The GPL is a "virus" which says that if you use the technology, a
ny "derivitive work"
​ is not yours exclusively, ​
you must be willing to give the sources to not only the original but your
work anyone that asks for it.    This means that if you use the technology
you have to provide a way for people to get your source code.

Different people find each to have advantages and disadvantages.

The big advantage to a dead-fish stlye license for a large project is that
you can import and export code or portions of code at will and not have to
worry about trying to make everything available with all of the different
threads. And it means some one can make a commerical product based on the
code and add extentions that they "protect."

The advantage to viral license, is that it means once the code is made
"open" it must always available.  So it "enables" things like CentOS vs
RHEL because Red Hat is required to make all their extensions freely
available as source and anyone can use it.

I have used both licenses in my career.  I personally grew with stuff the
research community, so that style is fine with me. Generally, speaking, the
things I have cared about where made available to me in some way or
another, so I never found it limiting.    I understand the desire for the
GPL, but I also understand the issues that some organizations have with it.

FYI:  @ Intel we require all programmers to take a course on the
differences between the license and make sure everyone knows how to
properly handle code.

Clem
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