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FSF's Opinion of the Apple Public Source License
Stian Engen writes "Bradley Kuhn of the FSF does not recommend the release of new software using the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 2.0 despite its
newly accuired Free Software License."
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They have all sorts of Free Software Liscences they recomend against.
Even a handful of Copy-lefted ones.
This is essentially a copy left for everyone escept Apple, who gets BSD like (from the FSF comments, I couldn't find that in the actual liscense though).
practically every non GPL compatible Copy-Left on their site says "though it is OK to use this software we recomend against using the liscense for new software".
And all the BSDish ones recomend using the X11 liscense instead. I don't see how this is news one bit.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
From http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html we see that FSF "...recommend[s] it[the LGPL] for special circumstances only." There are quite a few other licenses on that page, the Perl license, the X11 license, etc., which FSF reccomends. More specifically FSF reccomends that you use a license which makes your work "free software" as defined here http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here.
No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
As is every other license on the planet... The GPL is pretty much the only exception.
Fair enough, that's one big red check-mark.
That's being quite hypocritical there. Their policy is that software released under every other license should be able to be GPL'd, but it's fine that, once GPL'd, it can't be used with software under any other license... Really, really one-sided guys.
Of course, if that was a problem, they could very well change the GPL now couldn't they??? No, they'd rather have the rest of the world change to what they want.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Its a hell of a lot better than the old license. And its not like developers working with Darwin have much of a choice. I mean, who is going to use the APSL on a non Apple derived product?
Heh. The FSF has this to say about the original BSD license; I suspect you would see the same thing happen with APSL2-licensed stuff...
There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, including the X10 license, the X11/XFree86 license, the FreeBSD license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses. Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Initially the obnoxious BSD advertising clause was used only in the Berkeley Software Distribution. That did not cause any particular problem, because including one sentence in an ad is not a great practical difficulty.
If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the University of California--then they would not have made the problem any bigger.
But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.
When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would not be surprised if the list has grown by now. [Remember, this was written in 1998; this has obviously not happened.]
Jay (=