Open-source Licensing: BSD or GPL?

BSDForums.org writes "Mark Brewer of Covalent Technologies argues BSD is better for the enterprise. As open source licensing models, both the Berkeley Software Distribution license and the General Public License have advantages and disadvantages. But in the end, the BSD offers more benefits to enterprise customers. Matt Asay of Novell makes the case for GPL. He says, no one open source license is ideal in every circumstance. Different licenses serve different ends. Berkeley Software Distribution-style licenses have been used to govern the development of exceptional open source projects such as Apache. Clearly, BSD has its strengths. However, all things being equal, he prefers the General Public License (GPL ). The GPL is one of the most exciting, innovative capitalist tools ever created. The GPL breaks down walls between vendors and customers while enabling strong competitive differentiation. Which is a better licensing model for open-source applications: BSD or GPL? What do you think?"

Comments

Re:Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

[Xtifr]

Your analysis is blindingly oversimplified. Most companies would rather GPL their own code than release it under a BSD license, but would rather have others release their code under a BSD license.

Actually, most companies don't care! Most companies aren't in the software market, don't want to be in the software market, don't care about the license as long as they can freely use and copy the software for their own purposes, and think all this arguing is insane. As far as they're concerned, the BSD and GPL licenses are functionally equivalent.

But for the tiny percentage of all companies that actually are in the software or computer services market, the BSD license is something they only want to see applied to other people's code. So, saying they "prefer" the BSD license is hopelessly naive and misguided. They prefer to give away as little as possible, while getting as much as possible. And, in general, many of them seem to find the GPL or other copyleft licenses to be a reasonable compromise.

The benefit to businesses of the GPL is quite obvious (at least to smart companies, of which there are an increasing number). They can release their own code without worrying that their competitors will abscond with it, improve it, and not share those improvements.

Me, I tend to prefer the BSD license for my own code, as it's simpler, and there's less to worry about. But it's a very mild preference, and I happily contribute to GPL'd projects as well.