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

[Clem Cole]

I appologies to the list for turning this into a religious war, I did not
intend that
​.  I should have known better, but I had hoped to avoid it by trying to be
fair and factual​
.  I had hoped to enducate a few people on why the GPL might night be
desired
​ by many projects.​

​To Pontus, I'm not going to debate you.  You asked a question, and I tried
to answer it fairly. I was trying to ​impress that there are many reasons
that the GPL is (using your words) draconian and can not be used.  I'm not
a lawyer but my company employes a number of them and I am in fact, trained
by them to teach the GPL & Copyright course for it.   I do think I
understand the clever and sometimes very fine distinctions - intended and
otherwise of the two styles of license.

As ur lawyers have explaiend it, the fact is that GPL moves most of the
rights from the developers and owner of the IP to the users of the IP
(which was what exactly rms intended).  But in doing so, the developers
must give up some rights that may not want or be able to give up for them
to operate successfully.

Just, as I'm not going to say communisim is good or bad or capitalism is
worse or better.   Both political schemes have their uses.  And a viral
license and a dead fish license both have uses and are attractive.  They
key is that they are often at odds with each other and thus projects often
have a hard time with code that had a virus in it.

That said, some projects (DAPL and OFED as examples) are "dual licenses" so
that ther kernel portions of the code can be assumed by the kernel.org
folks and the other parts can put into people products (like NetApps does)
without concern that the "virus" contaminates the product.

The fact is the lawyers are the ones that term the GPL a "viral" license.
We engineers just picked up the term.  You don't have to like it, but it is
how it works and describes what happens when it is in used. And that
behavior is >>exactly<< what rms intended.   He was trying to force the
hand of firms so that they would have to make their sources available on
the asking.   The result of the virus did work in a few cases, but more
often people looked carefully at the provienance of the code and ensure it
is "clean" before they take it into a project.    And that behavour is
because of that virus there >>are<< transistive rules that in fact do come
into bear and those can difficult to handle.

As I said, I use both and understand why both exist and I try not to judge
a project by it's license.   It means that the people behind the project
have made specific choices that work for them.

Clem
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