[Gslug-general] BSD

Thu Feb 25 21:08:58 PST 2010

merc248 at gmail.com wrote:
> Some would say that that's the point of BSD licensing: the programmer
> uses the BSD license for the greatest amount of use, no matter whether
> it is forked and made proprietary or not.  However, I remember reading
> something from Theo de Raadt about how he does not reap any reward at
> all, not even respect from vendors who routinely use his team's code
> and fork it (openssh, etc.)
>
> Though to be honest, I don't think we'd even see TCP/IP as an
> implemented standard if the BSD implementation was licensed under GPL
> rather than BSD; hell, Microsoft used the BSD TCP/IP stack in their
> own code.
>
> James Michael:
>
>   
again being open source is about not having to reinvent the wheel, to 
allow people to use your code.  
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7833143728685685343#docid=8073195220998636516
this video should explain more of where im coming from.
>> free code is defined by most to be free to everyone where GPL stops a lot of businesses
>> from actually using GPL'ed code to make profit. most companies that use GPL'ed code
>> don't make money off their software, they make it off the support of the software. Such as
>> redhat, google and others are all support companies not like video game programmers.
>> There will never be a profitable single player GPL'ed video game mainly because you will
>> be giving the video game away for free and also trying to charge people for it.
>>     
>
> I'd have to disagree with you on this point.  There's companies out
> there that definitely make a profit out of selling GPL software.  Look
> at Zmanda, Red Hat, Novell, etc.  The difference is where the profit
> is made.
>
> -- ian
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Paul Bartell <paul.bartell at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> This is definetly a "problem" as many would put it with the GPL. The
>> main reason for this is so that code stays open and can then be
>> further improved upon by others. If a company forks a project, changes
>> one line of code, and starts selling it, people will end up paying a
>> company lots of money for something that really doesn't need to be
>> paid..
>>
>> If you think that GPL'd code cannot be used in a commercial product,
>> talk to a lawyer. Numerous companies do it. Putting a bunch of gpl
>> code together and supporting it is definetly within the limits of the
>> license as well as including you own proprietary pieces to be bundled
>> with an OS (say a linux distro for example). While it might take more
>> work than something under a BSD license, it is definetly worth
>> checking out.
>>
>> While BSD is great for lots of things (look at the success of pfsense
>> and its derivatives), it is not quite to the point where linux and
>> other GPL'd software is, and probably won't be since there are no
>> protections in place to stop code from simply being forked and made
>> proprietary.
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:59 PM, James Michael <jamesthefishy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> merc248 at gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> I administer a NetBSD VPS (for myself) and an OpenBSD router (for a
>>> coffee shop) myself, and I've been wanting to install FreeBSD on my
>>> desktop machine for a while now (unfortunately, nVidia doesn't have a
>>> good 64-bit driver available yet for FreeBSD); I usually try to
>>> license any of my scripts or code with the BSD license as well.  In
>>> terms of licensing, I prefer the BSD license, but only because I'd
>>> rather benefit the greatest amount of people, including companies.  I
>>> also prefer *BSD over Linux for its outstanding code quality in the
>>> base system, though I also deploy and administer many Linux systems
>>> since it is usually a hell of a lot more supported than *BSD's (from
>>> my own experience, if you want to go with an enterprise open source
>>> piece of software, it's typically only supported on (Red Hat based)
>>> Linux systems.)
>>>
>>> I usually view the BSD license as a free license that protects
>>> developer freedom; the GPL protects code freedom.  In a sense, the GPL
>>> is "viral"; once you GPL a piece of code, that piece of code will make
>>> an entire project GPL if the project is released publicly (nothing
>>> precludes using GPL'ed code for your own gain if the project is not
>>> public.)  The corollary to this is that choosing GPL is likely to be a
>>> political choice: do you wish for a world with free code?
>>>
>>>
>>> free code is defined by most to be free to everyone where GPL stops a lot of
>>> businesses from actually using GPL'ed code to make profit. most companies
>>> that use GPL'ed code don't make money off their software, they make it off
>>> the support of the software. Such as redhat, google and others are all
>>> support companies not like video game programmers. There will never be a
>>> profitable single player GPL'ed video game mainly because you will be giving
>>> the video game away for free and also trying to charge people for it.
>>>
>>> -- ian
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:00 PM, James Michael <jamesthefishy at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> not to start a flame war but i wanted to see how many gsluger there were out
>>> there who used bsd, I specially use netbsd and freebsd and i prefer the BSD
>>> license over most and prefer everything else over the GPL. I find the GPL is
>>> very limiting when it comes to developing for profit. Opensource's original
>>> goal was to allow people to not have to reinvent the wheel at every turn. It
>>> seems very annoying that the GNU crowd is forcing the future code to say
>>> open, code they don't write or touch or have nothing to do with and they
>>> make laws around it just because it uses libraries or files from a GPL'ed
>>> program. It makes no sense to me. I wanted to know why people think the GPL
>>> was so great in comparision to more freeing licenses. Please note i would
>>> like to keep this respectful, not everyone needs to throw their two cents
>>> in. I don't want a flame war over this.
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>       
>>
>> --
>> Random quote of the week/month/whenever i get to updating it: "Quis custodiet
>> ipsos custodes?": "who shall watch the watchers themselves?" - Juvenal
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>>     
>
>
>
>   

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