HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OS Licenses

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that in order to help nudge Linux and open source software further into the enterprise, a vice president at Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday called on rivals IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc to invalidate their open-source software licenses in favor of a free licensing model. During his keynote at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday, HP's vice president of open source and NonStop Enterprise Martin Fink commended the Open Source Initiative on setting up new rules to limit the growth of open-source licenses." From the article: "He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted. Fink also called on Sun Microsystems to deprecate its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which applies to OpenSolaris, GlassFish and JWSDP, and to re-license Solaris 10 under the General Public License, which drew the crowd's applause."

Comments

A lot of hot air

[j1mmy]

HP is moving more and more towards the consumer desktop market. Is this guy even going to have a job next week?

(first post?)

Re:A lot of hot air

[james_r_boyer]

HP is actually not moving toward the Consumer Desktop market. With the exception of printers that is only a small part of the HP profits. Most of the money to be made rests in highend servers and services.

Re:A lot of hot air

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget their superb calculators!

Re:A lot of hot air

[Anonymous Coward]

That was during the Carly period.
Some things are changing with Hurd.

Re:A lot of hot air

[dnoyeb]

Interesting? That post has nothing to do with the topic. Notwithstanding, HP has little to do with what they are dicussing either.

On topic: Personally I have called for the same thing.

Fundamentally one must recognize the seperate ideologies. IBM has a team of lawyers and I don't think they are too concerned about going to court to enforce the CPL. Thus, they don't care if its not totally clear. Dare I say, being not totally clear benefits the one with the most lawyers.

On the contrary, the GPL/LGPL is created by people without a team of lawyers and that do not intend to dive into court with reckless abandon. It needs to stand on its own. If you read both licenses you will see that. CPL seems to think it can explain stuff in a FAQ. Many have pointed out that the FAQ is not legally relevant to the license. While GPL/LGPL explain a lot more in the license text.

If you got a team of lawyers, then any license is good enough as you are probably using patents to defend yourself anyway. One should consider the legal budget of companies that develop the license. Their needs/objectives may be affected by it.

Re:A lot of hot air

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, the GPL/LGPL is created by people without a team of lawyers and that do not intend to dive into court with reckless abandon.

Where'd you get that idea? Both were written by Eben Moglen, the FSF's legal counsel.

s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

Reducing the license count is good, but put those apps under the BSD license instead. That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied. They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program. I've had folks send in contributions to PMD and say that if it was GPL'd they wouldn't be contributing their code.

And the fact that Compuware wraps PMD and calls it OptimalAdvisor? More power to them! Maybe they'll contribute a bug fix or two, and maybe I'll sell a couple more copies of the book. A rising tide, as it were...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

And also Microsoft can steal the code and use it Windows Linux.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[paitre]

Except that there are a lot of folks that don't -want- their OSS work to be commercialized by anyone else, if they're not going to do it themselves.

The BSD is a great license, but that is actually a -weakness-, IMO - that anyone can take BSD code, make a new product out of it, and not have to release those changes back to the community.

It's called leeching.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[cnettel]

It's called free as in "no strings attached".

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[AKAImBatman]

The BSD is a great license, but [the ability to commercialize] is actually a -weakness-

No, it's not a weekness any more than the GPL's requirement to provide source code is. Choose the right license for what you want to do, and you'll have no problems. For example, the Apache project works on the idea that providing a common code base instead of reinventing the wheel at 500 different companies is a good thing. Thus they provide code (donated by many of those same companies!) under the BSD license specifically so the software *can* be commercialized.

In the case of Linux, control over the source code is a more important feature than not reinventing the wheel. Thus it's under the GPL license.

You people need to wake up and remember the programmer's addage, "Use the right tool for the right job!"

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[lisaparratt]

It's free as in actually free, rather than whatever custom definition fits the proposers agenda, be it communist, commercial, or what ever.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

It's called free as in "no strings attached".

It's called free as in "working for the Man for free.", or "I'm an idiot." for short.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> It's called leeching.

True! There's a tradeoff there though - how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL? I'd rather give those folks a safe way to contribute, and I've got zero interest in tracking down GPL violators.

And it seems to be working out well - check the contributors page. Most of the real interesting stuff in PMD has come from other folks... like the data flow analysis stuff, for example. I want to avoid any chance of scaring away those folks ...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[fimbulvetr]

I agree.

Although the BSD license has its place, I think the GPL is superior in the arena of source changes.

I'm all for being able to change the code, and if you distrubute the modified code, everyone should be able to see what you modified. That is what the GPL license gives us.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

They wouldn't be stealing anything, as the license allows that kind of use.

If you try to see BSD-like licenses from the perspective that "close sourcing" == "stealing", then you might as well just avoid it.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ruie]

Reducing the license count is good, but put those apps under the BSD license instead. That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied.

The important point of GPL is that it lowers entry barriers into the market - as distributors of GPL software must release all their changes back a newcomer with a neat idea can easily release a product that is just like the competition plus one improvement.

If you change all licenses to BSD than the first company that will not be a good corporate citizen and stop contributing their changes will become a monopoly.

Speaking of monopolies and changes, we know that Microsoft used BSD TCP/IP stack in Windows. Now what were their contributions back ?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[LnxAddct]

Yea, nothing like spending your time coding something with the intent of furthering the community, only to have someone take your code, give you no credit, and profit from it. In general, people must be motivated or forced to do the right thing, the GPL enforces a strong community where as the BSD license places too much trust in corporations. I assure you that without the GPL you would not have huge companies working together on advancing linux. Do you really think Red Hat and Novell would be swapping security patches and other code enhancements if they weren't forced to? The proprietary advantage is too enticing for corporations, in fact a good lawyer could even argue that a corporation couldn't make such changes public simply because it would not be giving share holders maximum value. The GPL enforces cooperation and stimulates growth, it is a good license. This is not to say that the BSD license should never be used, but I feel much more comfortable contributing code to projects where I know my code will go to furthering the community as a whole.
Regards,
Steve

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The GPL doesn't prevent commercialization. It does, however, reduce the chance proprietary and incompatible variations.

Companies CAN licence GPL'd software, they have to go to the software's copyright owner, and if that owner is willing, negotiate a different licence that suits the company in question.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[rawwa.venoise]

I don't object the commercialization of source code, but having a company to sell a product and not refer to the author? At least some for of public acknoledge should be given to the creators IMHO

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[stienman]

It's called leeching.

As opposed to the GPL's form of forced reverse leeching?

Using the GPL is like saying, "If you don't follow my rules, you can't use my tools."

That's fine. I have no problem with authors choosing whatever license they want.

I would argue that *more* freedom comes to the user with software licensed under the BSD license. I have fewer restrictions when I choose BSD licensed software.

When I choose to license software under BSD, I am choosing to allow my users greater freedom than the GPL provides.

My community contributed software is a gift of my time and resources. I feel that gifts should come without strings and without expectations.

-Adam

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Lussarn]

how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL

Not many I would think, they can contribute their code with a BSD or even public domain licence and you can still use it in a GPL codebase. Or didn't I understand the problem?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

"It's called free as in "working for the Man for free.", or "I'm an idiot." for short."

It's called free as in "not only you can make choices, but everyone else too". And you look like someone who has a hard time accepting that kind of freedom.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Infernal Device]

I would call it Free From Philosophy.

Or perhaps Free From Hidden Agendas.

Free From Politics.

Free From Misinterpretation.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[YA_Python_dev]

... put those apps under the BSD license instead. That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied. They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.

I don't know what you mean with "hands tied", but you can do all the things you list with both the BSD and the GNU GPL license... the only things you can't do with the GPL is use someone's else code in closed source/proprietary apps without authorization from the author(s).

But you can "make some money" by selling GPLed commercial software, if someone want to buy it. (Don't confuse proprietary with commercial software!)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[stienman]

Therefore, GPL'd software is NOT a gift. It is simply a resource that one may choose to use or not use. If one uses this community resource are bound by the restrictions outlined in the license.

-Adam

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[BRonsk]

It's called leeching.
It's not called leeching. It's called being stupid and short-sighted.

If you take a piece of BSD software, fork it and close source it, you HAVE to give back your changes to the community. Otherwise your fork will get gradually away from the BSD 'still-open' branch. Soon enough incorporating changes from the main branch will be next to impossible: You won't benefit from the community effort anymore.

In clear, the BSD license grant people the right to be stupid. Hard to call that a weakness: There are and always will be stupid people.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[LurkerXXX]

The Apache license for 2.x is unfortunately not just a vanillay BSD license. It has some limiting stuff in it which is why OpenBSD is still using the 1.x version of Apache by default. It's got a true free license.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Pxtl]

Free from sense? To use the BSD license is to devalue the time you spent on the code. A BSD-licensed project is shouting into vacuum - nobody but other altruists will ever publish improvements. GPL means that others who use the code are required to be as generous as you were. If they don't give back to you, at least they'll give back to others.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Donny Smith]

> And also Microsoft can steal the code and use it Windows Linux.

If it's published under BSD license, it can't be stolen, stupid.

And if MS uses it (in) Windows Linux (Microsoft Linux, it's going to compatible with Linux (or BSD). What's wrong with that. If they want to invest resources in further code development and fork it, it's their money...

And if you dont' want to use their stuff, just use the original/free BSD code.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Drooling Iguana]

That's one of the few restrictions the BSD license does place on its licensees. You must give credit to the original authors of whatever BSD-licensed code you use in your projects.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> they can contribute their code with a
> BSD or even public domain licence

Right, but I think their concern is that they may "contaminate" themselves by looking at the GPL'd code. You know, it's like looking at CDDL'd code; if those ideas show up in your own code later and someone traces it back, bad times. Better to just stand clear, you know?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Pxtl]

It depends what you want to happen with your product.

If your tool is complete and you don't want any help with it, and people should use it freely, use the BSD license.

If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.

By using the GPL, it says "look, I put some effort in here - you can use it for free, but all I expect is that if you do something cool with it, you do the same thing I did". This seems perfectly reasonable, and seems like a way to ensure the long-term success of a product.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[LurkerXXX]

How do they become a monopoly? Everyone else has a copy of the original BSD code. The only monopoly they have is over their own creative changes. Just as would happen if they wrote closed-source software of their own from scratch in-house.

The Original BSD software is still out there. Did the TCP/IP stack for FreeBSD stop working when Microsoft copied it? Did Microsoft then have a monopoly on TCP/IP stacks? NO! THINK!

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[ltbarcly]

but put those apps under the BSD license instead. ... They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.

You've just described EXACTLY what the GPL is, BSD license with a requirement to feed changes/enhancements back into the program. That is what the license does, period.

With the BSD license a company is much more likely to take the BSD'd code, and then that's it. For example, microsoft's TCP stack.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

"A BSD-licensed project is shouting into vacuum - nobody but other altruists will ever publish improvements."

As it should be. After all free software is about freedom, and freedom cannot be achieved by forcing choices.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Greatmoose]

But that's the essence of truly being free. I can take the code and then I have the freedom of choice whether to make a profit off of it or not, to give back to the community or not. That's the beauty of freedom, it's MY choice, not yours.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[MrLint]

if you arent gong to commercialize your own work, and you dont want anyone else to do it, then just burn the damned code. Everyone wants to have money in their pocket. If its not directly from product, its from associated services. i really wish ppl would stop pretending this doenst exist. You can still be altruistic and still find a way to 'put food on your family'

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Usquebaugh]

I thought the addage was 'if it ain't broke don't fix it"

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[stienman]

If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements. (Emphasis added)

GPL: The cynic's license.

-Adam

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[sconeu]

At my job, a lot of what we produce is IP. As such, we make a choice not to incorporate GPLed code into our software. That is our choice. We are aware of the trade-off (i.e. either follow the GPL or roll your own), and take that into account.

We may wish that the authors had chosen a different license, but we respect their wishes.

Note that we *use* GPL software (cygwin, gcc, etc...), but do not incoroporate it into anything that we redistribute. I, for one, would love to contribute code back for the particular software I use, but it's not my area of expertise.

In short, if you don't want to follow the rules of GPL, don't incorporate GPL code into your software. Find another alternative. It's that simple.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[billybob2]

Please mod parent up. They bring up excellent points on why the GPL's copyleft/forced-sharing provisions are in the interest of the user and good for preventing monopolies.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is is if they created their own BSD that cured cancer, ended war, and solved world hunger. The patches to make a free version would never see the light of day.

GPL: "You have the freedom to do whatever you want except reduce the freedoms of others"

BSD: "You have the freedom to do whatever you want, and if that includes taking freedoms away from others make sure you pay us off first"

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[merdark]

The GPL ultimately talks to the selfish in us. Remember, a BSD project can be relicensed as any other license. So in fact more people are likely to use your code since they can relicense their changed version under whatever license they want.

There is no way whatsoever that licensing under the BSD is worse than the GPL, unless of course the real reason you want to give away code is not to help others, but rather to benifit yourself.

How do you benifit yourself? You force others to put changed under YOUR license of choice. This means you get access to their changes whether they want to be nice or not, and it may also push your political agenda by forcing people to use your particular philosophy bound license.

Then, there is always the spitefullness aspect of the GPL. "If *I* can't make money off the code, you sure as hell won't either!"

So what is your motive? Greed, Power, or Spitefullness?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Now what were their contributions back ?

Other then makign an operating system which facilited the consumer driver PC market and making PC's household appliacnes, I guess nothing.

You sir, are a fuckign retard.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[l3v1]

It's called free as in "no strings attached"

Yes, for people who want to make easy money on work done by community people. GPL can mean protection. Protection that your work won't be stolen by sensless FOSS-opposing jerks and sold for money without giving credit.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed; but the 'right tool' in this case probably *is* the GPL. These are *corporations* producing this open source software. While they want to make the source available to OSS developers, I can't imagine why they would want to let other corporations make a profit off their work. They paid for the R&D; if there is a profit to be made, well... its still their code, and they can relicense it at their pleasure. In this case (IMHO), BSD *is* a weakness (in many other applications, of course, the circumstances might dictate otherwise.. YMMV)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Pxtl]

Yes, it is cynical. I never said it wasn't. The GPL is a good compromise between pure-free BSD and commercial freeware. It is a pragmatic viewpoint that allows for free use and resale of software, but requires that you obey the Golden Rule.

I don't believe the OSS community would have gotten half as far without the GPL. People are selfish - that's how the economy works. GPL means that free-software is compatible with the selfishness of the human race. Anything else is idealism.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

put those apps under the BSD license instead

I love taking/using BSD software, but I sure as hell would never create any! You might be able to get away with creating BSD software because you're doing it for fun. But you'll have to explain to me how Sun releasing Solaris under BSD wouldn't be corporate suicide.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

find a way to 'put food on your family'

FOOD FIGHT!!!!

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

To take this to the extreme, I hope at least, you wouldn't support an ax murders "freedom" to kill at will. After all it is his choice. You (should) have the freedom to do what ever you want unless it causes harm to someone else. I'd call depriving the community of patches harmful. BSD is definitely "pure freedom". The problem is "pure freedom" is ethically deficient as it allows you to harm others.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[billybob2]

Reducing the license count is good, but put those apps under the BSD license instead

So that M$ can steal that code, slap on some DRM for the music/movie cartel, and sell it back without providing the improved source code to the user?

That would be like giving M$ a humangous birthday gift. I'm bringing the cake, who's bringing the sodas?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[JonnyCalcutta]

In general, people must be motivated or forced to do the right thing

I'm glad you agree with our European socialist policies now.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[freshman_a]

...use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.

Well hell... somebody better let these guys know then.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[gowen]

Greed, Power, or Spitefullness?

Am I trying to help everyone, regardless of their motive, or am I trying to promote the common good.

I've got an GPL licensed axe. I'll lend it to you if you want to build a log cabin, or cut firewood for yourself, or if you want to make a better axe that we can all share, you may borrow it.

If you want to use it for something I consider morally wrong (say, murder) then you can get your own fucking axe.

Similarly, I've got a GPL house. If you need shelter, you can come in. But if you want to use it to turn tricks, or sell crack, get your own fucking house.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Undertaker43017]

"For example, microsoft's TCP stack"

So what? Sure they took it, and they hacked it all up, who in their right mind would want it back? It in no way caused the original code to stop working, and I don't see the BSD folks wanting to integrate any of MS's changes.

There is no right or wrong license, it's all about what the original developer(s) of the code want done with their code.

If you feel that users of your code should give back to the community, then the GPL is right for you. If a company choses not to use your code, because of the license, then that is the right decision for them.

Life is about choice, there are multiple OSS licenses because everyone has a different idea about what they want to do with their creations.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

put those apps under the BSD license instead.

Yeah, I'm sure that's what IBM wants, to become an R&D house for their competition, and they get nothing back.

That way folks can use your program without their hands being tied.

The same thing applies for the GPL - people can *USE* the software without any "hands being tied."

They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.

Or they can make a product out of it, sell it for a profit and *NEVER* feed the changes/improvements back! What a *GREAT* idea!

The GPL is clearly better in this regard because it forces your competition onto a level playing field.

I've had folks send in contributions to PMD and say that if it was GPL'd they wouldn't be contributing their code.

And I bet there are just as many who *didn't* send in contributions because they didn't want you to be able to proprietarize their code.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

These companies are often building platforms, so they not only want OSS developers to improve the code they use, but that their customers will use. If that code is under the GPL, it can cause problems when linking to libraries. So its LGPL if you want to go with the FSF group, which is a reasonable choice.

These companies are not open sourcing code that they are charging for: they are building a user base to provide services and/or products to. Making it easy and not scary for their customers to build on their platforms is key. Generally the only commercial varients would even be positive, because it would proliferate the platform and drive business back to the source vendor. The BSD would be fine, and settle any legal worries.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Get Behind the Mule]

The first poster said:

They can even make a product out of it, make some money, and feed changes/improvements back into the program.

The second poster said:

You've just described EXACTLY what the GPL is, BSD license with a requirement to feed changes/enhancements back into the program. That is what the license does, period.

Nope, that is not the same. The BSD says you can do that, but you don't have to if you don't want to. The GPL says you must do that. Big difference.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

"depriving the community of patches" is harmful just as long as the community is entitled to those patches to begin with. There is no moral rule, nor law, nor nothing that says you can't keep your modifications to yourself... only the GPL. If the license is a BSD license then basically there's no reason why you shouldn't have the freedom to do what you want with your own modifications. There is no harm done to anyone involved.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Spackler]

As opposed to the GPL's form of forced reverse leeching?

In english, we call that giving back.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[oldwarrior]

used to be just called Public Domain. Worked then, would work now.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? It would obviously be their code doing all of these wonderful things, not the BSD code, because if it were the BSD code, they wouldn't be able to stop anyone else using it.

If you want a real example, look at BSD sockets. Almost everyone, including Microsoft, added BSD sockets to their systems (using the BSD interfaces, implementation or both), and the result is that all sorts of diverse systems can now communicate with each other. Microsoft's use of BSD sockets doesn't take it away from anyone else, and can't.

In the days before BSD sockets were available to everyone, there were all sorts of proprietary networking technologies, making communication between systems from different vendors extremely difficult. BSD sockets solved this problem because it was truly open. If it had been distributed under something like the GPL, most commercial vendors would have refused to use it, and it would never have become any sort of standard.

The reality of the two licences is more like:

GPL: You have the freedom to do what you wish with our source code, as long as you agree with our (GNU/FSF) philosophy. You can't take away the freedom of other users of our code because we own the copyright to it, not you.

BSD: You have the freedom to do what you wish with our source code, even if you disagree with out philosophy. You can't take away the freedom of other users of our code because we own the copyright to it, not you.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[linzeal]

BSD = Greater freedom for the Individual
GPL = Greater freedom for the Community

Being an Anarcho -Syndicalist after flirting with such ideas as Anarcho-Individualism.

I chose Chomsky over Peacock.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Professional Slacker]

There is no harm done to anyone involved.

... except those deprived of the patches.

Freedom is good, but why are you endorsing the freedom to be an asshole?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[muuh-gnu]

> This means you get access to their changes whether they want to be nice or not

Of course, why are you so amazed about it? IT is the point to force freedom, the same way IRL force is used to abolish slavery (proprietary licences.)

> to give away code is not to help others, but rather to benifit yourself.

Wrong, absolutely wrong. The goal when using the GPL is to ensure that your code is never going to go proprietary and the basic freedoms taken away. I just fucking dont want anyone to restrict people access to my own code.

> If *I* can't make money off the code, you sure as hell won't either!

Wrong again. They can sell it as they want, but dont act as a little Stalin and restrict the access to the code, just to "make money". If their only way to "make money" is to restrict the access and the freedoms of the code, they can write their shit from scratch.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Undertaker43017]

"I've got an GPL licensed axe. I'll lend it to you if you want to build a log cabin, or cut firewood for yourself, or if you want to make a better axe that we can all share, you may borrow it.

If you want to use it for something I consider morally wrong (say, murder) then you can get your own fucking axe."

Not entirely actuate. The axe you gave me did certain things, chopping wood, etc, under the GPL I am free to extend the capabilities of your axe to include murder, as long as I offer my extensions back to you and the community, I am legal. You are free to accept or deny my extensions, but you can't deny me using your original with my extensions.

Same goes for your house example...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[arkanes]

While I'm sure the "spite" aspect plays a role, the main motivation of the GPL is actually something quite different. The freedom being protected in the GPL is the freedom of the user, not of the programmer. The point is to ensure that software users can change, modify, fix, or audit the software they run without onerous commercial licensing. That sort of freedom is what the GPL considers important and thats what it is designed the protect. The BSD license doesn't offer that protection, and therefor to people who think the freedom of software users should be protected, it's insufficent. This is political, to the extent that "People have the right to be empowered" is political.

The secondary purpose is to create a culture of sharing. You could view it sort of as the difference between a potluck and a soup kitchen.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

... except those deprived of the patches.

Only that you can be deprived of something you are entitled to, and not of something that doesn't belong to you. Morally speaking I see no reason why other people should be entitled to my work.

Freedom is good, but why are you endorsing the freedom to be an asshole?

Nice flame. The assholes are those who think that I, as a developer, have no rights when it comes to my own code and my own work. Make no mistakes, if I have to follow the terms of the GPL, I will... but that doesn't make other choices "morally unacceptable".

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[CaptKilljoy]

>Yes, for people who want to make easy money on work done by community people.

Yeah, like Red Hat and IBM. That Linus is such a chump.

Oh, is that not what you meant? So sorry.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ruie]

Microsoft does have monopoly on TCP/IP stacks on Windows. And if you wanted to create a customized version (say with better firewall implementation) you cannot.

Secondly, I said all the software under BSD license. This means that a company that compiles it with some small addon can reasonably claim that what they have is better than competitors and they have something that competitors do not.

Yes, thinking is useful.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[wintermute740]

You people need to wake up and remember the programmer's addage, "Use the right tool for the right job!"

You must me new around here. Everyone knows that their tool of choice is the only one that matters, and everyone *must* switch to it immediately ;)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[gowen]

The axe you gave me did certain things, chopping wood, etc, under the GPL I am free to extend the capabilities of your axe to include murder

Sorry, the analogy is clearly unclear. I meant murder as metaphor. You're right, the GPL does allow me to add tactical thermonuclear capability to emacs, even though RMS would probably be against.

The morally repugnant behaviour that I symbolised by "murder" would be (say) a convicted monopoly using my BSD code as the foundation, and then embracing and extending that code to lock people into their new propreitory protocols. (And I'd be locked out of those protocols even though they're based on my work).

<Shatner>I can't get behind that.</Shatner>

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Infernal Device]

To use the BSD license is to devalue the time you spent on the code.

Not at all. Perhaps the value comes from spending time with the code, not from the actual code itself.

A BSD-licensed project is shouting into vacuum - nobody but other altruists will ever publish improvements.

And your point is? So what? Real altruism has to start somewhere and it doesn't start with the GPL. Forced altruism is not altruism.

GPL means that others who use the code are required to be as generous as you were.

Required to be generous? Being generous should never be required. One should be generous because one wants to be generous or because one wants to contribute. Forcing people to be generous will freely make them assholes.

The BSD License values the individual's achievements, but doesn't require anyone else to if they don't want to. The GPL values the group contribution to the detriment of the individual members.

Which one is more free?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[muuh-gnu]

> how many folks will _not_ contribute since they want to stand clear of the GPL?

And then, compare those numbers to the numbers of people who will _not_ contribute to a BSD licensed project sincfe they do not want anyone to incorporate their code into proprietary commercial projects, without giving _anything_ back to the community.

I think that summa sumarum, the Pro-GPL folks outnumber the Pro-BSD folks by orders of some magnitudes.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[LurkerXXX]

Microsoft does have monopoly on TCP/IP stacks on Windows.

That's not what I asked. I asked if they had a monopoly on TCP/IP stacks. The answer is NO. No you aren't able to modify MS's software. That has nothing to do with them having a monopoly on all TCP/IP software, or even a monopoly on TCP/IP stacks based on BSD's TCP/IP stack.

If MS added some neat feature to the stack that you like, you can go ahead and code a similar feature to the freely available BSD stack. You are starting with the same raw materials (the publically available BSD stack), and they even gave you the idea to use. They didn't 'steal' the code, or suddenly prevent you from modifying the BSD code yourself.

Certainly if they add on some feature that actually makes the software better, they can claim that theirs is better than the competition. That's how software evolves. Competitive pressure is put on. Do you really want to keep using the same code that was used 20 years ago? Of course not. You keep evolving it. Some company branching off a private copy in no way prevents you from adding on an even better feature yourself. The public BSD code never goes away. If you want to add features to compete with someone, go ahead and add them. They can't stop you.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[CDarklock]

> there are a lot of folks that don't
> -want- their OSS work to be
> commercialized by anyone else

And yet, you can't stop anyone else from selling your code under the GPL. So the GPL doesn't work here, either. In fact, *no* open source license works. You would have to develop copyrighted freeware with source. And that wouldn't work, either; it already failed in the eighties.

If you don't want anyone but you to commercialise a project, you have to withhold it from the market until you decide to commercialise it. We call this "proprietary" software, and many people are already doing it.

> The BSD is a great license, but that is
> actually a -weakness-, IMO - that anyone
> can take BSD code, make a new product out
> of it, and not have to release those
> changes back to the community.

This is what we call "freedom". The GPL trades it for "security". (Somebody in the early history of the U.S. said something about that once.)

Here's the question. Let's say you write some code, and you share it. I see your code, and it gives me an idea; I want to write some more code. Who should decide what I can do with my code?

The GPL thinks *you* should decide. Once I've seen your code, my new code is implementing an idea that was a derivative work of your code, so you should be able to tell me what I can do with it. Unfortunately, I can't "unsee" your code or "unknow" my idea.

The BSD license thinks *I* should decide. After all, I wrote the code, so you can help yourself to a big healthy serving of STFU.

The really *big* difference in what the GPL means as opposed to what the BSD license means isn't really evident to the developer, it's evident to the reseller. Take two companies, A and B. A releases a project that took years to build. B grabs that project and makes a minor modification to it in a couple weeks. Now B has a project worth more than A's project. How can A respond?

Under the GPL, B must release their changes, and A can now sell the exact same project. The playing field is leveled. Nobody has an advantage.

Under the BSD license, B does not have to release their changes. A does not have what B has developed. B has obtained a commercial advantage. However, A does not have to release everything they do, either. They can now turn around and release their own changes, and perhaps gain a commercial advantage over B.

So which license is better? It depends on your development and marketing muscle. If you have more marketers than developers, the GPL is superior, because all you have to do is shout louder to get more users. If you have more developers than marketers, the BSD license is superior, because it allows you to differentiate your product in the marketplace.

So which side are you on?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[fitten]

I was just thinking... in order to redistribute YOUR code if you use GPL code, you must GIVE UP (some of) your copyrights to your code.

What's to prevent me from writing some modifications to GPL'd code and telling everyone that they must first download the GPL'd code, then download my patch files and recompile? I'm not redistributing GPL code in that situation.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously suggesting that refusing to share the product of your own efforts is morally equivalent to killing someone with an axe? If so, that's the stupidest attempt to defend the GPL I've ever heard.

If I spend my time writing code, articles, a book or anything else, it's my bloody work, not yours, or your precious "community's"! If I decide to share it with your "community", I'm giving you something. The act of not giving away something that belongs to me does not in any way infringe on the rights of others in the way that harming them (eg stealing their work or attacking them with an axe) does.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[greed]

If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.

There is no requirement in the GPL for modifiers to give modifications back to the original author.

All it requires is that recipients of the modified version get the modified source (or an offer to provide the source) used to produce it.

So if someone modifies your GPL'ed program and no-one ever gives you a modified copy, you'll never see those changes. IBM, Apple, Netscape and Sun have tried "give us all your changes" licenses, and they were lambasted for doing so.

I'm sitting on a number of modifications for CVS and GNU Make, which I'll never send back into the maintainers. But everyone with access to the modified binaries can also get at the corresponding source.

These changes don't make much sense outside of my particular company--changes that are "good for the world" I send back upstream, but that's because I want to help others, not because the GPL requires that I do.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Hope Thelps]

The BSD says you can do that, but you don't have to if you don't want to. The GPL says you must do that. Big difference.

True. Although the BSD zealots will whine, nag and rant interminably over how we should all be using their license, the BSDL itself isn't so demanding.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Brandybuck]

Except that there are a lot of folks that don't -want- their OSS work to be commercialized by anyone else

Yet these same people have no problem with people commercializing their code if it's under the GPL! As evidence I point to the thunderous applause this ass received when he suggested commercial Solaris be put under the GPL.

I can vaguely understand why some weekend hobbyist wouldn't want the code he shared with his neighbor commercialized, but I cannot understand why people think putting commercial code under the BSD license would be a bad thing. Other than Sun, the FSF, and a few people still living in their parents' basement, who would bitch about a BSD licensed Solaris?

Oh, that's right! Martin Fink of HP!

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[slavemowgli]

There's nothing "forced" about the GPL, and certainly no "forced reverse leeching". Keep in mind that noone's ever being *forced* to use GPL'ed code; they can just as well develop their own solution, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, the fact that a GPL'ed product exists is entirely irrelevant if you don't use it - you're no worse off than you'd be if the GPL'ed product was not available at all.

That being said, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the BSD license, either; it's just that some people prefer one and some prefer the other, and both groups have good reasons for their respective stances, too. Whether either license is "better" is a question that cannot be answered objectively.

As for the BSD license allowing more freedom, that depends on what your definition of freedom is - and, for that matter, what your definition of "users" is. The GPL and the BSD license provide different kinds of freedom.

You may think of your software as a free gift that the receivers can use in whatever way they want, but others (like me) view their software as part of a bigger deal - I'll scratch your back, and you scratch mine. I don't expect anyone who uses my software to give back by contributing to it, but *if* they want to build on it, I expect them to honour the deal as well.

In that sense, neither license is better or worse than the other, so let's stop fighting over these things. :)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[ltbarcly]

Ok, let me spell it out for you schlomo.

GPL = BSD + extra stuff

extra stuff = requirement to give back changes and enhancements.

So I am saying that they are different. In fact, I EXPLICITLY SAY THAT THEY ARE DIFFERENT.

I'm saying that if you "Take a car, and give it a truck body, and truck tires" then "you have a truck". If you "Take the BSD license" and "require people to share their changes" then you have "the GPL license".

Basically the GPL is BSD+sharingrequirements+overhead, where overhead is technical language to make it airtight.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[muuh-gnu]

> Therefore, GPL'd software is NOT a gift.

It IS a gift. Sure, not for the proprietary developer who wants to constrict access to that code and make money by selling "rights" to use what has been made constricted, but it is a gift to the user, who has been given the free software rights (using, modifying, distributing) at no cost.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[QuietLagoon]

I'm so glad this sub-thread started. It is about time that there was a discussion of BSD vs GPL on /.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't get behind that.

Sheesh, if somebody gives you a cookie, do you suddenly become a morally repugnant cookie leech?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[runderwo]

Unfortunately for your argument, proprietary and incompatible variations of software is exactly how most commercial software firms make their money. Since the software is proprietary, they can reap the rewards of being the sole source of support. Since it is incompatible (usually one-way incompatible so you can migrate in but cannot migrate out) they've got your data and your infrastructure by the cajones. So in theory, the GPL does not prevent commercialization. But in practice, for an overwhelming percentage of software business strategies, it does. Not that those are not detestable strategies, but this is the real world...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Undertaker43017]

All choices have risks and rewards. You find it "morally repungnant" and a risk that the BSD license allows such behaviour, I on the other hand, find it rewarding that someone found value in my effort, regardless what they ultimately do with it (totally symbolic, I am not in anyway claiming that the BSD TCP/IP stack is "my effort" ;).

That's why choices are personal and something that each indivdual needs to be able to make. I don't extend or develop GPL software because it restricts my choice and the end user's choice. The BSD and LGPL give myself and the end user the ability to choose how we want to use the software.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that summa sumarum, the Pro-GPL folks outnumber the Pro-BSD folks by orders of some magnitudes.

I'd say you're probably right, but looking at the major contributions to the software world licensed under BSD versus GPL, it would appear the BSD developers are much more productive when it comes to implementing new things, as opposed to cloning and refining existing things.

Fundamentally, if you look at Linux, for example, there's very little if anything in it that would substantially increase the value of a proprietary operating system, especially the ones Linux is a clone of. The same goes for GCC, in comparison to the proprietary compilers it's a clone of. There's quite a contrast when looking at things like BSD sockets, Mach and the X Window System, which implemented new ideas and have added huge amounts of value to both proprietary and open systems. OpenSSH too, whilst not new (but based on the original SSH code, which was licensed under a liberal licence), has added a tremendous amount of value to open and closed systems alike.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[belroth]

There is no moral rule, nor law, nor nothing that says you can't keep your modifications to yourself... only the GPL.

The GPL doesn't stop you keeping your modifications to yourself - if you don't distribute them.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Fareq]

you are correct.

you are also towing a very fine line... it's all a matter of whether you think you could explain the concept of a patch to a nontechnical judge and/or jury.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Or free from responsibility.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

and freedom cannot be achieved by forcing choices.

This is, of course, a completely intellectually bankrupt argument that you often hear from BSD devotees who haven't actually thought it through.

I mean, I want the freedom to enslave others -- but it's illegal. Freedom hating bastard... always telling me what to do. I also want the freedom to kill other people for whatever reason I choose, but the pesky legal system keeps threatening to punish me for it. Why do they claim that such restrictions enhance the freedom for everyone... it's *obviously* wrong. I should be able to do whatever I want... wah wah.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Peter La Casse]

Of course not. But it's perfectly reasonable for somebody to refuse to give you a cookie (if they're not otherwise obligated to) if you are going to do something with it that they don't approve of (like smear it into the carpet.)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Peter La Casse]

So what is your motive? Greed, Power, or Spitefullness?

A fourth possible motive is altruism.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is, of course, a completely intellectually bankrupt argument that you often hear from BSD devotees who haven't actually thought it through.

I mean, I want the freedom to enslave others -- but it's illegal. Freedom hating bastard... always telling me what to do. I also want the freedom to kill other people for whatever reason I choose, but the pesky legal system keeps threatening to punish me for it. Why do they claim that such restrictions enhance the freedom for everyone... it's *obviously* wrong. I should be able to do whatever I want... wah wah."

As opposed to (at least one of) the GPL devotees who DID think it through and came to the conclusion that homicide and slavery are comparable to not open sourcing your code.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[arose]

Isn't (or rather wasn't) GCC just an implementation of a C compiler, as oposed to a feature-for-feature clone? Emacs certainly isn't a clone of anything. Either way it sometimes makes sense to put new things under a BSD like license to further software freedom (e.g. Vorbis, PNG). The authors of Vorbis certainly aren't firmly in the BSD camp.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[merdark]

I just fucking dont want anyone to restrict people access to my own code.

But modifying your code or adding to it and relicensing it does not restrict any freedoms to your code, the code you released. You are attempting to impose your will on others. Which is fine, but that is what you are doing. Your code is not free. People have to share their modifications in return for using it in their application. That is a form of payment. Sorry.

If their only way to "make money" is to restrict the access and the freedoms of the code, they can write their shit from scratch.

Code does not have freedom. Code is. Just like a log does not have freedom.

The GPL restircts the freedoms of people who use it. Not as much as other licenses, but none the less it does.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[deaddrunk]

I didn't realise using the law to keep information in the public domain was communist, sounds more like democracy to me.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Alsee]

BSD license

I am absolutely baffled why anyone promotes the BSD license, or bothers with it at all. Why don't you come right out and say you want programmers to throw their code into the public domain?

-

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[belroth]

I try to think of it terms of the "chain of users":
If A writes some software and passes it to B who makes changes and passes it to C then under the GPL C gets rights to all the source code, under the BSD C may only get the binary.

The BSD license may give 'more rights' to the 1st users to get it, but subsequent recipients may lose out. Under the GPL all users have the same rights, including those to changes/enhancements to the original codebase.

In my opinion the GPL is better for most uses, but the BSD certainly has its place. I can see no reason whatsoever for the likes of IBM to place their contributions under the BSD and give their comptetitors the ability to compete with them by developing it. With the GPL IBM don't lose out to a competitor as they

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[arose]

If you change all licenses to BSD than the first company that will not be a good corporate citizen and stop contributing their changes will become a monopoly.

How do they become a monopoly?

Copyright, the base code is out there for everyone, but they have exclusive control over their changes. They will probably not tell their customers where to get the base code either.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[dnoyeb]

That whole post is pure FUD. The GPL is not about freedom, its about sharing.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[merdark]

If people don't want to give up their freedoms to proprietary software, they can simply choose to use open software. The GPL does nothing to protect this choice.

What it does do is try to entice programmers into being forced to write GPL code and hence support the philosophy. This is fine, but it is not protection, but rather advocation and leverage. It

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> I am absolutely baffled why anyone
> promotes the BSD

Because it allows folks to use/wrap/copy the code with having to open source their code.

> Why don't you come right out and say you
> want programmers to throw their code into
> the public domain?

Why would that be bad?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[digitalunity]

And your point is? So what? Real altruism has to start somewhere and it doesn't start with the GPL. Forced altruism is not altruism.

I don't care if their altruism is forced or freely given. Earlier this year, I spent about 200 hours trying to reverse engineer the SCSI/MMC commands. I used the BSD license on my code and released it. I was e-mailed by another developer who tried to describe a more efficient method of constructing SCSI command packets. He said he already coded the improvement in his own product, but he wouldn't give it to me because he had relicensed it. If I had originally licensed this under the GPL, he wouldn't have that option(unless he wasn't distributing it). That also is completely ignoring the fact that he could steal my code and put it in his product without me knowing, but that is a whole other can of worms.

That is a good example of why the BSD license can suck. I have since made other improvements in my library and have relicensed it under the GPL.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the only decent post in this BSD/GPL thread. Never forget about the user.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[LurkerXXX]

Copyright, the base code is out there for everyone, but they have exclusive control over their changes.

Right. They have control over their changes, just as they would if they wrote the software from scratch (which their changes are) but the rest is out there and public. They only have a 'monopoly' over their changes, not the public code. All the public code is still public.

They will probably not tell their customers where to get the base code either.

Part of the BSD license is they must retain copyright notice listing the original BSD authors. They have to publish that. It's a pretty good indicator of where to get the code base...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[chris_mahan]

You don't givve up your copyright. You grant a limited use, in accortdance to the license. Failure to follow the license rescinds this limited use. The license, in fact, protect you, the contributor, from people using your code without following the license.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it okay to tell other people not to give out cookies to people if the giver has no objection to what they do to it, even "smearing it into the carpet"? That's just being a annoying busybody to me.

(By the way, if you consider making money to be so evil (even with things freely given), feel free to forward your paycheck to me to avoid the stain on your purity.)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Kuciwalker]

Which community? The open-source community, or the "majority of people who actually use computers" community? Because if it's the latter, they are much better served by having code out there that anyone can and will use.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[arkanes]

No. Try this.

"I believe in the rights of software users, and code that I write will not be used to remove those writes from them".

If this statement is true for you, then the GPL is a good license for your code. If your priorities lie elsewhere, then it is likely that a different license will suit you better.

The idea that the GPL is only used by selfish people who want to force others to give up code is ridiculous. For one thing, if thats your goal there's far better licenses for it - like the Sun license, for example. Or even a proprietary one.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[arose]

A (deeply buried) copyright notice does not tell the end user that they can get some of the source if they know where to look.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[OpenServe]

Thus they provide code (donated by many of those same companies!) under the BSD license specifically so the software *can* be commercialized.

There are a few cases where BSD still makes sense today, but it is important not to confuse the issues. GPL does not prevent commercialization or in-house modifications; it only prevents creation of proprietary derivatives. There are plenty of ways to commercialize GPL software, whether you wrote it or somebody else or both. Most BSD die hards I've talked to hold the underlying belief that the only way to make money in software is to go proprietary. They believe that the software industry would effectively cease to exist if everything was GPL-style open source. As a result, they believe that BSD is superior because it improves the health of proprietary vendors and thus, presumably, the industry at large. They incorrectly view GPL as taking away the freedom to commercialize and make a living in software. This perspective is incredibly short-sighted and usually sprinkled with misconceptions.

The biggest reason why there is not more commercialized GPL software is simply the fear of trying something new. Many software companies are comfortable with the proprietary model because that's all they've ever used. BSD perpetuates the status quo; GPL challenges it. Turning to the example of Apache's success, could it have worked with GPL instead? Absolutely! Honestly, how many successful proprietary derivatives of Apache projects are there? Apache has so much momentum that there is little or no market for them. Nevertheless, there is an enormous amount of commercialization around the Apache projects, particularly in the areas of services and in-house usage.

When you really get down to it, the issue is whether the industry would be better off if nearly all software was Open Source. GPL provides a means to get there; BSD does not. GPL is fundamentally a great equalizer -- it encourages free-market competition by making it nearly impossible to monopolize. In a world where the most popular software is (L)GPL licensed, it is more profitable to contribute to a common codebase than start from scratch and create a proprietary product. Again, this is little different from the Apache example; it's just more pervasive. Long term, the result will be the same -- whether via executives catching the vision of GPL or else creeping commoditization. IMO, why waste time. A software industry dominated by Open Source is better for everyone involved and better for society as a whole.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[crythias]

Darn Apple.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

No, a user of BSD licensed software has the same freedom. The difference is that the BSD licence allows free software to be mixed with proprietary software. Even when this happens, however, the free software remains free, which is the key point. The difference is that the creator of the proprietary software is free to control distribution of the proprietary work.

The purpose of the GPL is to coerce those who don't want to share their code into sharing it, by refusing to share code with them if they don't. Its origin goes back to Richard Stallman's conflict with James Gosling over the latter's emacs work. Gosling decided to commercialise his work, which was built on the earlier work of Stallman and others. Although the original code was still free for anyone else to use, Stallman went ballistic over the idea of Gosling's refusal to give away his (Gosling's) work. The GPL was created so Stallman could refuse to share his work with anyone who didn't share their own work with him.

Ultimately, Stallman didn't want to give away his code, he was far too greedy to do something like that. He only wanted to exchange his code with others who were willing to help him improve it: a mutually beneficial exchange; which is fine as far as it goes, but the reality is that the driving force behind the GPL is not freedom, but greed.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Peter La Casse]

Yeah, but it okay to tell other people not to give out cookies to people if the giver has no objection to what they do to it, even "smearing it into the carpet"? That's just being a annoying busybody to me.

Attempting to convince someone else of one's own point of view is an essential aspect of being human. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "I think someone in situation X should do Y."

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Alsee]

Because it allows folks to use/wrap/copy the code with having to open source their code.

Like I said, why don't you suggest public domain? Again, why would anyone ever want to bother with BSD?

Why would that be bad?

Did I say it would be bad? I am SUGGESTING you say that if that is the effect you want to achieve. If people want to public domain their work, fine. If people want to GPL their work, fine. I do not understand why anyone would advocate or bother using a BSD license. Saying to public domain the code is simpler and clearer. Then people don't have to bother digging up a copy of the BSD text and trying to figure out what it means legally and pasting it on the project for no reason.

-

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[riceboy50]

It's called "free as in beer".

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> why don't you suggest public domain?

I kind feel that the BSD license is more defined - when someone says "BSD", there's some text to go along with that. If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.

> Did I say it would be bad?

Touche! I had placed myself on the defensive already, my apologies.

> Saying to public domain the code is
> simpler and clearer.

I'm surprised to hear you say that; I guess I feel the opposite way - that a BSD license is simpler and clearer.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Nevyn]

But modifying your code or adding to it and relicensing it does not restrict any freedoms to your code

This is not true, there are many examples where companies have taken liberally licensed code like X or BIND and just included it wholesale with almost no "extra" code ... and the whole thing is then proprietary. Yes, in some cases you can argue that adding a graphics driver etc. is an addition ... but putting an introduction onto a novel doesn't make it a new novel.

People have to share their modifications in return for using it in their application. That is a form of payment. Sorry.

It is not a form of payment. If I let people live in my house "for free", but then kick them out if they steal my things or punch me in the face ... "not punching me" would not be considered a form of payment by any sane person. Good manners, an obvious condition, sure ... but payment, no.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom is freedom -- except when BSD devotees want to wriggle out of an argument.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

Most successful proprietary software firms make their money by providing features their customers want. Those that follow strategies such as you're suggesting typically end up being marginalised, as their customers migrate to alternatives from firms who respond to their requirements.

For firms whose business is based on meeting customer needs more rapidly than their competitors, the GPL is not viable, because under the GPL, any improvements made to satisfy customers must also be immediately made available to all competitors. Those who invest in R&D and technical development therefore lose out to those who invest only in marketing.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

What you are suggesting is effectively commoditisation of the software industry. What this would lead to is a situation in which investment in software itself would not generate a sufficient return to be generally profitable. As a result, investment in software would steadily decline, and technological progress would slow. Resources would be shifted from software development to profitable endeavours such as marketing, services and support.

Because of the way markets work, a situation such as the one above would likely be broken by innovation in one place or another. It might be innovation in new proprietary hardware, or it might be innovation in new proprietary software. One way or the other, the steady decline in investment in commodity software would leave a stagnant market, ripe to be overturned by investment in alternatives in one area or another.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

If your motive is altruism, why use the GPL rather than the BSDL or public domain? With the GPL, you are only willing to help others if they agree to help you. This is not altruism.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[IpalindromeI]

... and the whole thing is then proprietary.

You're thinking about the phrase "your code" differently than your parent intended. What he's saying is that even if some company comes and takes your code and "included it wholesale," that would not have any affect on the code that you wrote. Your code is still available, just as you wrote it, for anyone to use. The company would not be depriving anyone of using your code. They have not restricted its freedom because it is still available.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[kisielk]

Actually, I think the spirit of the GPL is to protect the freedom of the SOFTWARE. Not the developer nor the user

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[IpalindromeI]

The goal when using the GPL is to ensure that your code is never going to go proprietary and the basic freedoms taken away.

No, that isn't the goal of the GPL. Released code can never "go proprietary." If you write some code and release it, even if someone else uses it, your code is still available, regardless of what they do with it. Even if they release a proprietary product based on it, your code, the code you wrote and released, is still available. It is ready for anyone to use.

I just fucking dont want anyone to restrict people access to my own code.

No one can, once it is released, regardless of which license you use. They only way they could is if they hunted down every copy of the code that someone had made and deleted it. Do you think that is likely to happen? Because unless they do that, your own code is still available to anyone.

The GPL does restrict the freedoms of people who use your code. If you think it doesn't, you're wrong. Those people have less choices about what they can do with it than if it were under the BSD license. It's perfectly fine to want that. The whole reason licenses exist is to restrict freedoms. But you should know what the GPL is actually for, instead of just parrotting what you read on Slashdot.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Breakfast Pants]

"Wrong, absolutely wrong. The goal when using the GPL is to ensure that your code is never going to go proprietary and the basic freedoms taken away"--That never happens. "Your code" won't go proprietary with the BSD, it's just that "the next guy's additions" to "your code" might go proprietary; don't forget, it might go GPL as well. BSD is completely compatible with GPL, if you wanted to take anyone's BSD code today and make changes and rerelease as GPL you are freely welcome to do so.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[IpalindromeI]

The BSD license only sucks if you care what others do with your code. If you just wrote it to be useful, it's actually better because it's more likely to be used.

I'm not trying to disparage you. If you want to force others to share, that's fine. But not everyone has that opinion.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[lisaparratt]

It's in favour of the common good at the expense of the individual - it's communist by definition.

Bare in mind I'm from the UK, so I don't attach automatic negative connotations to communism.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[merdark]

Not according to 90% of the GPL supporters here, but I'm glad you see that.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

I on the other hand, find it rewarding that someone found value in my effort, regardless what they ultimately do with it

Which shows that amorality is not a neutral standpoint when compared to a moral one, just because it's not overtly immoral. It still isn't moral.

Helping Microsoft (let's call a spade a spade, here) to destroy other fellow programmer's livelihoods is not a positive or even a genuinely neutral action. Simply walking away and decrying all responsibility does not change the fact of what you have done.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

It's called free as in "not only you can make choices, but everyone else too". And you look like someone who has a hard time accepting that kind of freedom.

All evil needs is for good men to do nothing.

The BSD license is "doing nothing" so long as the Bill Gates of this world want to destroy the freedom to code and to share. There is no way in which helping him wipe out your fellow programmers 's freedoms is allowing people to make choices.

Get out of Utopia and look at the real world; we're in trouble and the enemy has billions to throw into his war-effort, so at least stop giving him free tanks. It'll be rolling over your house tomorrow.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

"Helping Microsoft (let's call a spade a spade, here) to destroy other fellow programmer's livelihoods is not a positive or even a genuinely neutral action."

Can you prove that yourself? Or are you just talking because you like the sound of your voice? Of course, following your flawed logic, one wonders if by making knifes he's guilty of homicide when someone misuses them.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

I would call it Free From Philosophy.

"I don't take sides, I kill for anyone". Big fucking hero.

Or perhaps Free From Hidden Agendas.

The fight to stop YOUR freedom to code being taken away from YOU is not a hidden agenda. MS uses BSD code as part of its war against freedom and you, you mug, are one of the targets of that war.

Free From Misinterpretation.

Because it's content-free. An empty gesture can have no interpretation.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

With the GPL, you are only willing to help others if they agree to help you. This is not altruism

Why is refusing to be abused "not altruism"? I think you're confusing alturism with "being a doormat".

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

Can you prove that yourself?

I'm talking about Microsoft here, the company founded on Bill Gates' open letter saying that software freedom is theft, and who continues to this day to tell that to anyone who'll listen. I don't know which Microsoft you were thinking about.

one wonders if by making knifes he's guilty of homicide when someone misuses them.

If a guy comes into your shop to buy knives and you know he's going to kill someone, it's not good enough to step out the back and let the assistant sell them and then pretend it's got nothing to do with you.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

After all free software is about freedom, and freedom cannot be achieved by forcing choices.

"Anti-slavery is about freedom, and freedom cannot be achieved by forcing choices. Therefore the slave-owners must decide for themselves to free their slaves."

Good luck waiting for it, meanwhile I'm rooting for Frederick Douglass in the form of the GPL.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[IpalindromeI]

I thought you might also be interested to know that even if you had originally licensed the code under the GPL, he wouldn't have had to give his modifications back to you. He only has to provide the source to those he distributes it to. So he could have taken your code, changed it a bit, and sold it for a tidey sum to some company. You'd never even hear about it unless that company decided to distribute it for some reason. The GPL's goal is to protect end-users, not whiney developers.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

"All evil needs is for good men to do nothing.

The BSD license is "doing nothing" so long as the Bill Gates of this world want to destroy the freedom to code and to share. There is no way in which helping him wipe out your fellow programmers 's freedoms is allowing people to make choices.

Get out of Utopia and look at the real world; we're in trouble and the enemy has billions to throw into his war-effort, so at least stop giving him free tanks. It'll be rolling over your house tomorrow.

TWW "

Oh, so because you have a personal crusade against Microsoft everyone else must have one too? Sorry but I don't like your extremist point of view.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Decameron81]

"I'm talking about Microsoft here, the company founded on Bill Gates' open letter saying that software freedom is theft, and who continues to this day to tell that to anyone who'll listen. I don't know which Microsoft you were thinking about."

People say lots of things the whole day. If you're going to fight all of them then good luck. I prefer to spend my time coding.

"If a guy comes into your shop to buy knives and you know he's going to kill someone, it's not good enough to step out the back and let the assistant sell them and then pretend it's got nothing to do with you."

Only problem is that with the source code, you can never know what the user will do with the code because you never meet them. It would be similar to selling knifes online... there's always the chance that they might be used to commit a crime, but that doesn't make you evil. = )

Microsoft might and might not use my code, and honestly I couldn't care less. The fact that I disagree with them doesn't make the GPL the right way to fight them. Especially since I don't want to live basing my choices on what they might or might not do.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[runderwo]

Well no, they have to make those changes available to their customers, not necessarily their competitors. Maybe a customer may then give it to a competitor, but it'd be hard to imagine why anyone would bother unless you manage to piss them off enough to migrate. In that way, it does give the customer more leverage though.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

Sorry but I don't like your extremist point of view.

Fair enough.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

Especially since I don't want to live basing my choices on what they might or might not do.

There is a pattern; I don't think there's much doubt about what they might do.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Infernal Device]

"I don't take sides, I kill for anyone". Big fucking hero.

I'm not out to be heroic - there are plenty of people much smarter with way more time on their hands who can and want to do that. I have to eat and I have to make a living. There's my justification - curse it all you want. If I'm erring, it's on the side of practicality, where I can pick and choose my battles.

The fight to stop YOUR freedom to code

Get over it - they can't stop you from coding. They can't stop you from releasing it, either. The net is way too powerful for the kind of Machiavellian schemes you are imagining. And if you, or others like you, want to represent me, then find out what I want, not what you think I need.

. MS uses BSD code as part of its war against freedom and you, you mug, are one of the targets of that war.

(see above about Machiavellian schemes). If Microsoft uses BSD code, great. It's legal. Nothing you or I can do about it. That's what the license is for.

Ultimately, I would rather lead by example, not lead by force. BSD licensing allows me to hand out whatever code I choose to and not have to worry about how it's used. The responsibility for ethical use or contribution of the code rests on the shoulders of the next person in line.

My final word is this: you can say I'm idiot or amoral or whatever, but I will always say that people should be generous or altruistic or whatever because they want to, not because you or I or anyone else tells them they should be.

Anything else is religion.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[pembo13]

Hmm. I thought they did that so they could make money, my bad.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[NutscrapeSucks]

> What you are suggesting is effectively commoditisation of the software industry

Yup, that's Stallmanomics in a nutshell.

> It might be innovation in new proprietary hardware,

And that too. The philosophy dates from the "mainframe in the basement" era, when expensive proprietary hardware subsidized free software. Whether this works in the era of $50 settop boxes remains to be seen.

Although the "innovation" approach works somewhat even in the free software world -- consider RedHat, who makes large investments in Linux and therefore reaps the rewards instead of the "stagnant" Debian et al.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it is. Help given to an altruist benefits many people, while help given to a mercenary benefits him and harms others. Therefore, any altruist should choose the former whenever they can.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[lifebouy]

There is no way whatsoever that licensing under the BSD is worse than the GPL, unless of course the real reason you want to give away code is not to help others, but rather to benifit yourself.

I think Open Source is about the benefit of all mankind. The point is, GPL'd code continues to benefit all mankind perpetually, even after the next guy adds to it. The BSD license does not. Therfore, with the BSD license, freedom can die. With the GPL, freedom is eternal. I'll take the eternal freedom, thank you. It's the difference between good, and Good(TM).

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

A competitor has only to buy one copy of the given software, in order to get full rights to the source code, and thus the right to copy anything valuable into its own product. In other words, any competitor that wants it can easily get it, so a firm is effectively required to give all changes immediately to all its competitors.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

altruism: willingness to do things which benefit other people, even if it results in disadvantage for yourself

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

A competitor has only to buy one copy of the given software, in order to get full rights to the source code, and thus the right to copy anything valuable into its own product. In other words, any competitor that wants it can easily get it, so a firm is effectively required to give all changes to its own software immediately to all its competitors.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[sessamoid]

GPL: The cynic's license.

Capitalism: The cynic's economic system.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[drsmithy]

The morally repugnant behaviour that I symbolised by "murder" would be (say) a convicted monopoly using my BSD code as the foundation, and then embracing and extending that code to lock people into their new propreitory protocols.

Why is it "morally repugnant" to "lock people in to proprietry protocols" but not to do so with the software license of your choice ?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

makes sense to me...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[deaddrunk]

So am I and I get called a commie a lot (strange since it's usually when I'm arguing against the indiscriminate killing of civilians which the commies were pretty fond of) but I'm still at a loss to see how making open and forcing to keep open is any more communist than say sharing scientific information with everybody i.e. you can use this information to make money but so can everyone else.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Flower]

Oh for fuck's sake! Hey, how about we blame the real "enemy of freedom" and just point the finger at all those programmers who whore themselves out for a paycheck and decent stock options? How about we all start acting like pod people and start screeching at any Tom, Dick or Harry we find using Windows? Afterall, Billy G wouldn't have shit if they didn't pay MS througb the nose for that EVIL software.

Compared to those two A-bombs the BSD license is a gentle summer breeze. CARP, OpenSSH, and Vorbis are just a miniscule example of some of the good that's come out of people who have used the BSD license.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[gowen]

Do you really not understand the difference between a closed interface, and a closed implementation of an open interface?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Flower]

Who has taken away his freedonm to code? Nothing prevents him from continuing to pound away at BSD code until the day he dies. It, just like GPL'd code, is open forever.

Taking BSD code and incorporating it into a proprietary product comes at a price. No more free development. You have to build a community from scratch. Still have to compete with an exisiting free product. Yeah MS has taken BSD code but big deal. The stuff that differentiates their product from OSS is their own code. Once again you're focusing on the tiny bottle of tabasco in Microsoft's MRE instead of focusing on the MSS Active Directory, MSS MSSQL, MSS Exchange and MSS XP.

Oh and as for content-free gestures. CARP provides a patent unencumbered alternative to VRRP that is not only more scalable but also more secure. Vorbis - patent free and saving game creators big bucks because it can be implemented free under a BSD license.

Yeah, real empty there.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[lisaparratt]

Freedom isn't about making money. Just the fact that I'm not free to rip it off completely, in my eyes, means it's not free. Not that I want to rip it off, you understand, it's just the principle of the thing.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

I will always say that people should be generous or altruistic or whatever because they want to, not because you or I or anyone else tells them they should be.

That's right, and I reserve the right to not help those that are not. I don't personally see the GPL as a way of forcing generousity - that's an oxymoron - but as a way of hampering those that are not. If it's a problem for them, then tough.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

altruism: willingness to do things which benefit other people, even if it results in disadvantage for yourself

Yes, but surely you can see that helping those who would prevent you from being alturistic to others in the future is an inherently condradictory stance?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

Nothing prevents him from continuing to pound away at BSD code until the day he dies. It, just like GPL'd code, is open forever.

So you've missed twenty years of Microsoft (and others) lobbying for software patents to stop people coding, then?

That's exactly what software patents are for; copyright already protected code from simple re-use (and that was largely because of lobbying by Gates), the only extra protection patents give is to prevent totally new code from being written.

How can you be unaware of these issues?

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[OpenServe]

What you are suggesting is effectively commoditisation of the software industry.

No, I'm suggesting that the software industry should be viewed as a labor / services market rather than an artificial goods market. Until machines program themselves, software labor will never be commoditized because developers will always have their specialties. So yes, all software itself can be commoditized in the sense that the code itself is not seen as the source of value. This is different than commoditizing the software industry. There's a huge difference.

What this would lead to is a situation in which investment in software itself would not generate a sufficient return to be generally profitable.

Investment in software itself does not need to be profitable on its own for the incentive to exist. Yes, we may eventually see the end of traditional software companies where all development is productized and centralized under one roof. Regardless, software companies will continue to become more diverse and fewer will take on the whole development load by themselves. Investment in software itself will be more driven by real user needs, and meeting those needs properly will always be profitable.

As a result, investment in software would steadily decline, and technological progress would slow. Resources would be shifted from software development to profitable endeavours such as marketing, services and support.

This is pure speculation. First, the total amount of investment in software is not what matters; the rate of meaningful production is what counts. Today's software industry is incredibly inefficient. If Open Source causes a massive increase in efficiency, due to code sharing, it is expected that investment in software itself may drop; but the total useful output could actually increase greatly. At the same time, Open Source dramatically reduces barriers of entry into the market and this has the opposite effect on investment. Likewise there is no reason whatsoever to believe that technological progress would likely slow. Most of the investment in today's software industry does not go into improving the state of the art; it goes into reinventing wheels. In terms of resource allocation, services and support are intimately tied to software development within the Open Source model. Companies that have tried to separate the two have generally failed.

One way or the other, the steady decline in investment in commodity software would leave a stagnant market, ripe to be overturned by investment in alternatives in one area or another.

Ironically, what you described is precisely where the software industry was before Open Source entered the scene and started shaking things up. Thus far, Open Source has done nothing but stimulate progress and innovation. The only thing that remains is full-on capitalization of the new labor market it has produced.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

Yes, but surely you can see that helping those who would prevent you from being alturistic to others in the future is an inherently condradictory stance?

If I give some of my code to someone, under even public domain, how can they stop me either: (a) giving that same code to someone else; (b) giving away any other code I write? The answer is they can't! They cannot stop me being altruistic, even if they're entirely selfish.

You're confusing altriusme with a philosophy of achieving a 'greater good' through not being altruistic. If Richard Stallman had been motivated by altruism, he would not have been bothered that James Gosling benefited from his emacs work without sharing his own code, and would therefore have never written the GPL.

I prefer the BSDL to the GPL because I think it provides greater utility to a greater number of people: even users of closed systems can benefit if the BSDL'd code is good enough to be integrated into them. Supporters of the GPL argue that it will lead to greater utility in the long run because it will destroy proprietary software (which the believe provides less utility than open software). This is a position I disagree with (primarily because I don't believe the utility of software in general is a function only of its licence), but a sound argument can certainly be made in favour of it.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

No, I'm suggesting that the software industry should be viewed as a labor / services market rather than an artificial goods market. Until machines program themselves, software labor will never be commoditized because developers will always have their specialties. So yes, all software itself can be commoditized in the sense that the code itself is not seen as the source of value. This is different than commoditizing the software industry. There's a huge difference.

You're playing a game of semantics. If I say the the RAM industry has been commoditised, it means exactly the same thing as saying that RAM has become a commodity. What this means is that there is no meaningful differentiation between RAM chips from different producers. In an entirely GPL world, there would be no meaningful differentiation between software from different producers.

Investment in software itself does not need to be profitable on its own for the incentive to exist. Yes, we may eventually see the end of traditional software companies where all development is productized and centralized under one roof. Regardless, software companies will continue to become more diverse and fewer will take on the whole development load by themselves. Investment in software itself will be more driven by real user needs, and meeting those needs properly will always be profitable.

Without a sufficient return on investment, new investment will not be made. If firm A invests in software to meet customer needs, but firm B can benefit from that investment too, it is obvious that firm B will have a competitive advantage, and thus the trend within the sector will be towards ever lower levels of investment. After all, there will always be alternatives to invest in if software development becomes unattractive.

This is pure speculation. First, the total amount of investment in software is not what matters; the rate of meaningful production is what counts. Today's software industry is incredibly inefficient. If Open Source causes a massive increase in efficiency, due to code sharing, it is expected that investment in software itself may drop; but the total useful output could actually increase greatly. At the same time, Open Source dramatically reduces barriers of entry into the market and this has the opposite effect on investment. Likewise there is no reason whatsoever to believe that technological progress would likely slow. Most of the investment in today's software industry does not go into improving the state of the art; it goes into reinventing wheels. In terms of resource allocation, services and support are intimately tied to software development within the Open Source model. Companies that have tried to separate the two have generally failed.

Open source with a GPL-like licence moves the software market from a market structure resembling monopolistic competition to one resembling perfect competition. Perfectly competitive markets are more efficient, yes, but they are also not profitable in the long run (which is why, for example, agriculture is subsidised). Under market structures more resembling monopoly, there is the possibility for profit in the long run, and this profit can be used to invest in new technology. One obvious example of the effects of monopoly investment is the development of Unix at AT&T.

GPL open source will lead to greater efficiency, yes, but this greater efficiency will reduce the opportunity for profit, and will drive many producers out of the market, especially those which invest heavily, since the benefits of such investment accrue to all producers, not only the ones funding the investment. The expected result, according to economic theory, will be cheaper software, but also lower rate technological progress.

Ironically, what you described is precisely where the software industry was before Open Source entered the scene and started shaking things up. Thus far, Open Source has done nothing but stimulate progress and innovation. The only thing that remains is full-on

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

Although the "innovation" approach works somewhat even in the free software world -- consider RedHat, who makes large investments in Linux and therefore reaps the rewards instead of the "stagnant" Debian et al.

I find this interesting, since economic theory would predict that investment in Linux made by Red Hat would benefit all Linux producers, and therefore leave Red Hat at a competitive disadvantage. Two possibilities that come to mind are:

1) Funding development of Linux allows Red Hat to provide better support than competitors who do not fund its development.

2) Red Hat is benefiting from its investment in the short run, but as other firms catch on, this will be eroded and its levels of investment will have to fall to maintain profitability.

I don't know which it is, but if it's the first one, that suggests a GPL-dominated software environment can still leave room for differentiation. That's good in the sense that it makes investment attractive, but if it is the case, it also means the GPL won't prevent domination of a given market by a single firm.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Rich0]

If someone says "it's public domain", my first question is "so, what does that mean?". A BSD license is a know quantity, IMHO.

Uh, the meaning of public domain was known AGES before BSD was ever invented.

It means that you relinquish copyright on the code. Anybody can do anything they want with it without fear. ANYTHING. That of course is the default with the 1st ammendment, but copyright is a limited restraint on freedom of expression. BSD is a far less limited restraint. Public domain is no restraint except that which is prohibited by other laws.

BSD does in fact have a few restrictions - such as not being able to sue the author of the software for failure to perform against some set of requirements that the author obviously wasn't aware of. This is a big reason behind why it is used. However, I wouldn't say that public domain isn't a known quantity.

I'm not advocating public domain (actually, I'm far more a GPL fan), but it isn't like there is any big mystery behind what it is...

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[nagora]

I think you are looking in the wrong place. What I'm getting at is that producing code which is then used by people like Gates to make produces which are then sold to make a profit which is ploughed into lobbying for software patents to prevent you and me writing new code is non-alturistic at about 4-ply, as it were. It may seem alturistic at first but in fact you are helping those who ultimately are buying the laws to prevent future code, and maybe even your past code given how the courts work if you're rich enough.

The GPL at least gets some value back out and the network of reliance it makes between companies that use GPL code make it harder for any one to attack the whole concept of free coders.

Gates once said that he could not see any reason why there should be non-Microsoft software in the world. To produce code for people like that without strings attached seems to be foolish in the long run, if you believe that everyone should be allowed the freedom to write code.

You're confusing altriusme with a philosophy of achieving a 'greater good' through not being altruistic.

I don't think I am, I'm trying to take a strictly practical stance that a 100% neutral alturism contains, in the current legal framework the seeds of its own destruction, and that BSD, GPL, and every other Free licence will go down together if we lose.

TWW

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> Anybody can do anything they want
> with it without fear.

Except remove it from the public domain, I daresay?

> I wouldn't say that public
> domain isn't a known quantity.

I should have said "it's an unknown quantity _to me_" :-)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

I think we shall have to agree to disagree on what altruism means. :-)

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

"How can you be unaware of these issues?"

You fight patents by opposing patents, not by sticking to the "Great and Holy" GPL.

On the other hand you missed a few years of those crazy GPL supporters trying to force it down everyone's throat. They are trying to convince everyone that the only way to achieve freedom is by doing whatever they say.

How can you not be aware of that issue?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[metamatic]

GPL is not about selfishness. GPL is a way of saying "I agree not to be selfish, but only if you agree not to be selfish too". It's about getting past the dilemma posed by companies such as Microsoft.

GPL does not prevent making money from the code either. I've made money from GPL code, as have many other people.

And nobody is forced to use GPLed code, so nobody is forced to release anything they write under the GPL. The only time you have to release anything under the GPL is if you choose to use GPL code someone else wrote.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[OpenServe]

In an entirely GPL world, there would be no meaningful differentiation between software from different producers.

That's true, but it wouldn't matter. In a GPL world, the important differentiation is in the provision of services, not software itself. Even today, studies that have shown that when companies acquire software, their willingness to pay is most strongly linked to warranties and product support. That product support often involves development of new or customized features. In addition, GPL does not require redistribution of in-house code. So if you create some "secret sauce" that is tailored to a specific company's internal needs, you don't have to make it public. This is no different than in-house software today, which represents a very large portion of the jobs out there.

If firm A invests in software to meet customer needs, but firm B can benefit from that investment too, it is obvious that firm B will have a competitive advantage, and thus the trend within the sector will be towards ever lower levels of investment.

You're still looking at the situation from the traditional perspective. You can't look at it as two competing software companies A and B, which are reluctant to invest large chunks of effort because the other will free-ride. Instead, consider hundreds of firms that use a particular piece of GPL software while each contribute small portions back to the shared codebase. The incentive is not to profit on software itself but to meet their own needs. Sharing improvements just makes the process easier and ultimately cheaper. All of those contributions add up over time and the software evolves through user-driven development. How that development occurs is variable. Some of it may be in-house work. Some of it may be contracted through core project leaders. Some of it may be a side-effect of hired support services.

Perfectly competitive markets are more efficient, yes, but they are also not profitable in the long run (which is why, for example, agriculture is subsidised). Under market structures more resembling monopoly, there is the possibility for profit in the long run, and this profit can be used to invest in new technology.

That's a reasonable consideration because Open Source does, indeed, largely eliminate the potential for monopoly profits. (services markets can be monopolized as well.. it's just much harder.) On the other hand, I do not believe that new software technology is primarily produced by large investors. Software, like science, is too evolutionary of a field. It's hard to force progress by simply throwing money at any one area -- in fact this can often result in "solutions in search of problems." In the early days of computing, large investment was needed to jump-start the industry; today, there are so many players that innovation happens automatically amidst the mundane. As a developer, I don't care about monopoly profits. I only care about making a reasonable living while doing what I enjoy. I am paid to meet needs but I innovate in the process because it makes the jobs more fun.

The advance of computer software technology was very rapid during the period from 1975-1995, the latter being roughly the time when open source began to become mainstream (because of the increasing use of the Internet). Since 1995, there has arguably been less progress in software development than there was from 1975-85 or from 1985-95.

Considering that Internet-related technologies have been the most world changing of any the industry has yet produced, it hardly seems fair to say that progress slowed around 1995, when these technologies went mainstream. I would also argue that we are currently in a period of refocusing on what really matters. At the end of the day, computers are supposed to make our lives / jobs easier while increasing productivity and improving communication. Historically, the proprietary software world has largely missed the mark by stifling the potential for true integration and automation. (software systems with organic unity vs. vendor-specific compatibility) Open source and open standards have been the largest drivers of this refocusing.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[runderwo]

There is no requirement that I sell my product to a particular person or entity, especially one who I believe has set out to undermine my business.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

That's true, but it wouldn't matter. In a GPL world, the important differentiation is in the provision of services, not software itself. Even today, studies that have shown that when companies acquire software, their willingness to pay is most strongly linked to warranties and product support. That product support often involves development of new or customized features. In addition, GPL does not require redistribution of in-house code. So if you create some "secret sauce" that is tailored to a specific company's internal needs, you don't have to make it public. This is no different than in-house software today, which represents a very large portion of the jobs out there.

In this case, investment would be diverted from software development to services development. The end result might be production of a similar amount of overall value, at least initially, but even if this were so, the software would still see less investment and a slower rate of technological development. This would only be offset by a more highly developed services market. Do cheaper services represent technological progress? Would continued development of the services side of the business be sustainable, and lead to a similar level of overall value production to proprietary and BSDL'd software develepment? I don't know the answer to either question.

You're still looking at the situation from the traditional perspective. You can't look at it as two competing software companies A and B, which are reluctant to invest large chunks of effort because the other will free-ride. Instead, consider hundreds of firms that use a particular piece of GPL software while each contribute small portions back to the shared codebase. The incentive is not to profit on software itself but to meet their own needs. Sharing improvements just makes the process easier and ultimately cheaper. All of those contributions add up over time and the software evolves through user-driven development. How that development occurs is variable. Some of it may be in-house work. Some of it may be contracted through core project leaders. Some of it may be a side-effect of hired support services.

It doesn't matter how many firms there are, or whether or not software production is their primary business. If the benefits of investment accrue to all users, those who fund the investment will be put at a competitive disadvantage, and the market will push down levels of investment. An example of this is the PC market, where Dell has gained its position by explicitly doing as little investment in development of the PC platform as possible. This frees up resources for manufacturing, marketing and distribution.

That's a reasonable consideration because Open Source does, indeed, largely eliminate the potential for monopoly profits. (services markets can be monopolized as well.. it's just much harder.) On the other hand, I do not believe that new software technology is primarily produced by large investors. Software, like science, is too evolutionary of a field. It's hard to force progress by simply throwing money at any one area -- in fact this can often result in "solutions in search of problems." In the early days of computing, large investment was needed to jump-start the industry; today, there are so many players that innovation happens automatically amidst the mundane. As a developer, I don't care about monopoly profits. I only care about making a reasonable living while doing what I enjoy. I am paid to meet needs but I innovate in the process because it makes the jobs more fun.

It's not a monopoly situation, but rather monopolistic competition, which means each producer attempts to differentiate its products from others by adding value not available in them. This is the norm for most goods markets. Perfectly competitive markets (or their closest real-world approximations) are found in areas like agriculture, where individual producers have no power to influence prices.

If the services market allows for differentiation, then this could o

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Ravnen]

Do you think it's viable to investigate every one of your customers to make sure they aren't agents of your competitors? How will you guard against them later deciding to become such agents?

To use a real world example, do you think there is any way for Red Hat to prevent SuSE/Novell buying a single copy of Red Hat's most expensive product, and copying from it any code they find useful?

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[NutscrapeSucks]

I would agree with #1 and especially #2 -- any technical advantage that RedHat has is pretty short lived, but that's enough to sell it.

RedHat of course also has a proprietary advantage, not in the OS itself, but in it's official support for Oracle and many closed-source drivers.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Rich0]

Except remove it from the public domain, I daresay?

Well, any derived work you make could be made fully proprietary. What you can't do is claim copyright over the original work, since that would be fraud (to claim copyright you must claim authorship or assignment, which would be a lie). You could put one comment in the source code and legitimately claim copyright, but the original source code without the comment would be public domain.

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[tcopeland]

> the original source code without the
> comment would be public domain.

Gotcha, OK, yup, that makes sense. Thanks!

Re:s/GPL/BSD/

[Undertaker43017]

The GPL doesn't stop immoral behaviour.

As in the previous example adding muder to the GPL'd axe is perfectly legal under the GPL, provided I offer the enhancements back to the community.

All the GPL does is force me to share my (immoral) enhancements, it doesn't stop me from doing immoral things with others creations.

Under the GPL, Microsoft could use GPL'd software, internally, and this would indirectly be helping them "destroy other fellow programmer's livelihoods", since that software is solving a need for MS to do business. It's already known that MS does do this by investigating and testing Linux for flaws that they can then use to bring Linux down.

And then...

[LuciferBlack]

"IBM and SUN then asked HP to price printer supplies at a reasonable cost which drew and even bigger round of applause..."

Re:And then...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh how I'd mod you up if I had the points!

Re:And then...

[X0563511]

I do! ...

Shit!

Re:And then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one! I onced looked into additional memory for my LaserJet 1200 and it cost as much as the printer itself from HP. I think you could get the memory for about $40 USD from a memory comany. Go figure.

Why

[kevin_conaway]

Why? The article doesn't explain WHY it would be good for IBM and Sun to switch their licenses. To me, it seems like Fink is just trying to garner some positive attention to HP, which has been looked upon negatively for some time in the technical community.

On another note, did anyone else find it ironic that he is trying to push the ideals of software freedom of creativty and expression...by locking everyone under the same license?

Re:Why

[Spodlink05]

Why? The article doesn't explain WHY it would be good for IBM and Sun to switch their licenses. To me, it seems like Fink is just trying to garner some positive attention to HP, which has been looked upon negatively for some time in the technical community.

It wouldn't be good for IBM or SUN, it would be good for HP, why else would he say it? All you need to do to please ./ types these days is shout open source and they all start gormlessly clapping like guppies. You don't need to give silly things like reasons and logical arguments. Tsk!

Re:Why

[hackstraw]

The article doesn't explain WHY it would be good for IBM and Sun to switch their licenses.

Nor why HP doesn't think its good for themselves either. From http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1207 9_div/12079_div.HTML:

The HP-UX 11i Operating System license provides the right to use the software as described in these QuickSpecs, and is furnished under the licensing of Hewlett-Packard's Standard Terms and Conditions. Licenses for prior versions must be updated to this version either through the purchase of a Service Agreement that includes the rights-to-use new versions, or through the purchase of Update Licenses.

HP-UX 11i Operating Environment Per-Processor License, purchase separately: B9089AC
HP-UX 11i Enterprise Operating Environment, purchase separately from hardware: B9091AC
HP-UX 11i Enterprise to M/C OE upgrade Per-Processor License: B9094AC
HP-UX 11i Mission-Critical OE Per-Processor License, purchase separately: B9093AC

On another note, did anyone else find it ironic that he is trying to push the ideals of software freedom of creativty and expression...by locking everyone under the same license?

Yes, I did. I also agree with another poster that suggested maybe the BSD license vs. GPL. The GPL license is not very attractive to many commercial software companies, and may also conflict with other contracts that they are already bound to. In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors. The BSD TCI/IP stack should be a sufficient example.

Re:Why

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Let's see if HP opens up any of their sources, say, HP-UX, OpenVMS or any other software tech owned by HP.

Re:Why

[3nd32]

He's encouraging them to move to a more standard license so the software can be more widely integrated with other open source software. The fewer licenses there are, the simpler it is to use another app with your own without concern of being sued. Since their licenses serve basically the same purpose as GPL, they should switch to GPL to keep things simpler (GPL is just the first one that came to mind, I'm not saying that's the correct one for this situation).

Re:Why

[aug24]

In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors

If you're talking about commerce that wants something for free, yeah. If you're talking about firms that have something and are considering giving it away, they I'd say 'bullshit'.

Any example of contracts that prevent release under GPL while permitting it under BSD licence would be greatly appreciated, cos I don't think any exist.

Justin.

Re:Why

[Derkec]

Exactly. This is a much easier way to gain karma than to actually open source any of your own code. Simply call on your competitors to do so. You gain a karma point and they lose one when they tell you to fuck off.

Re:Why

[morgan_greywolf]

Well, the call was for Sun and IBM to change their open source licenses, not necessarily the licenses for their operating systems. OpenSolaris is licensed under the Sun's CDDL, true, but AIX is not offered under any open source license (though AIX 5L does include TONS of OSS)

Honestly, I don't see why HP should be standing up yelling anything about freeing up code How much code has HP contributed to the free software community? How much has IBM? How much has Sun?

HP has done much to hurt open source -- by using DRM in its inkjet cartridges, for instance, and then suing the pants off of rival cartridge makers under the DMCA, setting dangerous precedents for DMCA-style attacks on open source.

OTOH, HP has helped by releasing CUPS drivers for their printers under the GPL (the hpijs). But that was mostly self-interest anyway, since Linux users would typically buy Epson or Canon based on the availability of drivers. I can't tell you how many YEARS I went without being able to use all the features in my HP printers under Linux because of the lack of decent drivers.

OTGH, IBM has contributed TONS of code to the Linux kernel, to Apache (and I would assume to Tomcat, but I don't know for sure), and countless other open source projects.

What else has HP contributed? Anything?

Re:Why

[crumley]

In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors. The BSD TCI/IP stack should be a sufficient example.

BSD may be a more enticing license for commercial endeavors to borrow code from, which is what is shown by your example of BSD TCP/IP stack. I think that the GPL is more enticing for commercial endeavors to put there own software under. Commercial endeavors get to retain more control over their software and to prevent leeching. IBM and Sun's current free software licenses, while not copylefts, are closer to the GPL than to the BSDL.

I would guess that there is much more software with commercial roots that has been released under the GPL than the BSDL. Some examples are QT, and Mozilla.

Re:Why

[hackstraw]

How much code has HP contributed to the free software community?

A decent amount. Especially for the ia64 port of the Linux kernel. Speaking of the kernel, searching for hp.com yields:

find -type f | xargs egrep -i 'hp\.com'| field 2- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

62 * David Mosberger-Tang ignore, necessary to get around lameness filter M871E.B4:'4L(#$Q($%U9R`R,#`U(#$Q
24 * Stephane Eranian M=&5N="U$:7-P;W-I=CH@:6YL:
21 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 David Mosberger-Tang IA T87(N8V]M QY+51O.B`\,C`P-3`X,3`Q,C0P+D%!
9 * Copyright (C) 1998-2000 David Mosberger-Tang I86T@86YD($UA E=#X*36EM92U697)S:
6 * Copyright (C) 1999 David Mosberger-Tang 2!W96YT(&]U="!O9B!T;W
6 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2001 David Mosberger-Tang H*36EK90H*+2T@"B\M+2TM+2
5 * Copyright (C) 2000 David Mosberger-Tang AyFASqYoMmJPf85ZLO00VrEkvAqK1n
4 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/ QMQuvc4wCoVrwy6nntuCWUv5vqWUNL
4 * David Mosberger
3 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html>. 1N8xbkGGHFA6wsn2vg3Sb1CHBPR0xZ
3 http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/680/>.
3 * Copyright (C) 1999, 2001 David Mosberger-Tang
3 * Copyright (C) 1999-2000 David Mosberger-Tang
3 * Authors : Jean Tourrilhes - HPL -
2 Tourrilhes "); QUru8ETk2Tf3OSbyyVmxq7VtCczJDX
2 * Jean Tourrilhes , iy1RF8caRL62intVPcagjsviCAecgp
2 * I (Jean Tourrilhes - jt@hplb.hpl.hp.com) then started to make some
2 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Wavelan.html
2 * http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Wavelan.html
2 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html
2 http://www.hp.com/jornada/>. z6mDPHewxRuwEb3zZlqCtOb0d1DbVi
2 * (http://www.hp.com/go/retailbooks/) vnQQAeglPaprGeE8rAUIgCR7tU2Efq
2 Copyright (C) Alex Williamson (alex_williamson@hp.com)
2 * Copyright (C) 2002 Khalid Aziz
2 * Copyright (C) 2001, Jean Tourrilhes
2 * Copyright (C) 2001 Jean Tourrilhes, HP Labs
2 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Stephane Eranian
1 Weissgaerber , Dag Brattli and Jean Tourrilhes ");
1 * v1.25kf Added No Interrupt on successful Tx for some Tx's
1 This method provided by L. Julliard, Laurent_Julliard@grenoble.hp.com.
1 * Stephen Hack : Fixed ace_set_mac_addr for little
1 * see http://devresource.hp.com/devresource/docs/techpap ers/ia64/slit.pdf
1 report them to linux_udf@hpesjro.fc.hp.com, which is the
1 paul_bame@hp.com VkgRelv4ms3ijoXEUIn6x285iE3C4b
1 linux_udf@hpesjro.fc.hp.com
1 jt@hpl.hp.com
1 jsm@fc.hp.com Je8cG1SE6M8ckdHjFAHfIi0B6Zm9gy
1 "John Marvin"
1 * John Marvin
1 * Jean Tourrilhes (new version)
1 * Jean Tourrilhes - HPL - 17 November 00
1 * Jean Tourrilhes (jt@hplb.hpl.hp.com),
1 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html>
1 http://users.dhp.com/~whisper/ipfwadm2ipchains/
1 (http://software.hp.com/ia64linux/>).
1 handheld computer. See http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/720>
1 grundler@puffin.external.hp.com
1 Grant Grundler
1 * for FAST[+] chipsets.
1 eranian@hpl.hp.com
1 Eranian ");
1 Eranian
1 David Mosberger-Tang
1 davidm@hpl.hp.com if IA-64 related, else David.Mosberger@acm.org
1 davidm@hpl.hp.com z3eXOQku4EcpzW1M5WbfrIbrD4VKxW
1 * , and Jean Tourrilhes
1 * Copyright (C) 2002 Bjorn Helgaas
1 * Copyright (C) 2002 Alex Williamson
1 *

Re:Why

[Pollardito]

On another note, did anyone else find it ironic that he is trying to push the ideals of software freedom of creativty and expression...by locking everyone under the same license?

moreover there wasn't a peep about those most restrictive license that HP sells hardware for, Microsoft's. maybe they should put their foot down and refuse to sell products from those vendors

Re:Why

[Hope Thelps]

All you need to do to please ./ types these days is shout open source and they all start gormlessly clapping like guppies.

I wouldn't have thought guppies would be able to clap. Do they use their fins?

Re:Why

[khallow]

On another note, did anyone else find it ironic that he is trying to push the ideals of software freedom of creativty and expression...by locking everyone under the same license?

No. GPL is well understood, these other licenses are not. I don't appreciate creativity and expression in my licensing. Nor do I expect do most people.

Re:Why

[HeroreV]

Well, there was an issue with the old BSD license. see Wikipedia

Re:Why

[Spodlink05]

And predictably I'm modded down.

Somebody please explain OSI

[Anonymous Coward]

They act like a government regulatory agency. It seems like people have heart attacks if their licenses aren't OSI approved. I think it's all bull cocky. I don't care if my license isn't OSI approved, they can stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

Re:Somebody please explain OSI

[drmike0099]

What they're trying to do is make it so that the term "open source" doesn't just become another marketing term that has no actual meaning. I've seen a lot of closed source, proprietary vendors referring in their marketing to "open standards" or "open systems" trying to leech off of the open source term and get credit where they don't deserve it (and it works all too often). If you have to back up your "open source" claim with an OSI-approved license, it's harder to pull that crap.

I do agree with you though that their statement that there should be fewer OS licenses is outside of the scope of what they should be doing. Approve them or don't, realizing that they're talking about other peoples' copyrighted material that they can license however they want, but leave philosophical discussions to some other group. I agree with that stance, they just shouldn't be the ones pushing it.

Re:Somebody please explain OSI

[Lussarn]

For the OSS community it would probably be better to have fewer licences though, this isn't some kind of EULA you can press "next" on and be gone with. To use other poeples source in your own codebase you NEED to know the licence and understand it, otherwise you can be acused and sued for copyright infringement.

As it stands know the big ones are GPL, LGPL and the BSD family of licences. I think most OSS programmers can grasp these licences and can use source from projects knowing they don't commit a crime. With more licences, even if they are compatible it's much harder to share the code because one may not have the time to read and understand the licence or the money to hire a lawyer.

That said. Sun have their reasons not to go with the GPL. They gave their patents away to CDDL licenced code, they didn't want everybody to have them. They should be free to do this if it serves their strategy best. But it also makes the barrier to use their code very much steeper.

Re:Somebody please explain OSI

[simonecaldana]

I've seen a lot of closed source, proprietary vendors referring in their marketing to "open standards" or "open systems" trying to leech off of the open source term

They are not (unless they explicitly pervert these definitions by adding malicious explanations).

"Open standards" refers to an implementation of a "openly" agreed definition of something. RFCs are open standards, for example, as the ISO ones.

"Open Systems" generally refers to software whose internal operation is accessible (to a certain extent) thru a standardized and/or well documented interface which is not hindered by usage license. Examples: POSIX is an open system, XBOX is not.

Both terms have nothing to do with "source".

Re:Somebody please explain OSI

[drmike0099]

That's what I meant (the malicious explanation part); I certainly know what the terms *should* mean. There's nothing more irritating than sitting in an RFP and have the salesperson make some statement like "we have an open system, so it's all under your control" when what they're saying is please submit the appropriate feature request and we will implement it after the PO clears. Or use "open standard" to refer to their proprietary web service that happens to use SOAP and XML (the "standard" part of it).

I've even seen them go so far (knowing that we're a very heavy open source shop) to say "we use Apache!" or say "it's just like open source" when they don't allow us access to the Apache, and it's nothing like open source.

Microsoft has pulled the same trick using the other term, with their Shared Source idea. Very irritating when you're trying to explain what "open source" actually means to people who have neither an understanding of programming nor an understanding of intellectual property law.

Re:Somebody please explain OSI

[Russ Nelson]

They act like a government regulatory agency.

Except that OSI has hackers, who you can meet at trade shows, whose code you use, who respond to their email. When was the last time you were able to send email to a government regulatory agency and actually get a reply?

I don't care if my license isn't OSI approved,

I'm sorry you feel that way. We're only trying to protect the term 'open source' from abuse by you-know-who. Do you have a better plan?
-russ

How about IBM and Sun just not list their licenses

[bedroll]

I mean..they can use them, but does OSI have to list EVERY compatible license for use? If they changed that then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. I think they should just list the major OS licenses (GPL, BSD, CC:SA, etc) and hide the complete list where only those really worried about a particular license are going to look for it.

*rolls eyes*

[Slime-dogg]

This seems like meaningless posturing for positive HP market spin. I don't see why two other companies would listen to the head of HP, when they haven't really been listening to the community itself for years.

Re:*rolls eyes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Meaningless is right. I've seen the Solaris source code. Where's the source for HP-UX? Or for that matter why does the fact that I have two HP printers attached to my Windows XP system mean that I have to have six different software update agents running at all times?

No offense to the hardware vendor crowd, but honestly I want my drivers to be drivers and absolutely nothing else. If I am having problems I will come to you and ask for updates. I don't need your shit to be checking for updates on a daily basis.

oh noes

[cptbarkey]

please sir, make your product less effective then mine. please?

Just use the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their lawyers prefer to get paid to reinvent the wheel.

GNU/OpenSlowaris

[Anonymous Coward]

A decade too late for anybody to care. Congratulations to Sun execs, failure becomes you.
Java would be nice if it was under an Apache style license.

When opening your mouth you need to put beef in it

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk is cheap. Where is the money? Will HP compensate IBM and Sun for the fiscal losses they suffer when giving up on sound intellectual property?

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[ccbailey]

Why not the poor old LGPL? Everyone forgets about this little guy when the GPL vs BSD flamewars erupt. With LGPL you can make sure that no one leeches your code while allowing others to build commercial apps around it ands feed their children or whatever...

at the risk of sounding like an idiot

[castlec]

where is hp's example of following said request? if it exists, i'd like to know about it. if they aren't following their own advice/request then they are just stabbing IBM/Sun in a hope of gaining our faith and stealing market share.

Re:at the risk of sounding like an idiot

[tekiegreg]

I was going to say that too., I don't recall HP-UX or True64 unix being openly available. Even the old VMS acquired from DEC is still closely guarded code....is HP their own worst hypocrite?

Re:at the risk of sounding like an idiot

[Ngwenya]

where is hp's example of following said request?

The details of HP's contributions can be found on http://opensource.hp.com/.

It is true that the older systems like HP-UX, Tru64 and VMS aren't GPL'ed, but as I said in another post, it's probably very difficult to do so without either heavy recoding or relicensing of other codebases.

--Ng

Ever hear of LGPL?

[shareme]

If you read the LGPL description is was designed fro your situation in fact Linux uses it:)

What a load of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't HP publish all of their copyrighted and patented methods, procedures, inventions, etc under the GPL?

Who do they think they're fooling? And when did children start running multinational corporations?

Re:How about IBM and Sun just not list their licen

[Russ Nelson]

That's exactly what the license-proliferation committee will be doing.
-russ

GPL is Copyrighted too

[ikegami]

In contrast [to GPL], an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

In contrast? The GPL and works released undef GPL are Copyrighted too. GPL doesn't work without Copyright.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[tomstdenis]

Don't let little things like "facts" stand in the way of a good rant. ;-)

Tom

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confused. The *license* is copyrighted. The license is the document which starts with its name and ends with "END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS".

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Random832]

So is the GPL - you can't even create derivative works of it as you can for software licensed under it. The Free Software Foundation strongly reserves all its rights to the GPL itself under copyright law, much contrary to the GPL's own philosophy.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[mkcmkc]

strongly reserves all its rights to the GPL

Um, that's not true. The GPL has been copied probably millions of times, and the FSF has never objected to it, nor asked for a fee, etc.

They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he means the license itself is copyrighted.

It's obvious to everybody that ALL licenses work based on ownership of copyrights.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I assumed they meant the license itself was copyrighted. But, the GPL is copyrighted by the FSF:

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Qzukk]

They do disallow derived works, and it's perfectly obvious why they should.

Except that they don't disallow "derivative" works of the license, they just restrict what changes you can make (if the code was already GPLd) and you can't call the new license "GPL" or mention "GNU": http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #ModifyGPL

You can also add your own exceptions outside of the GPL, as suggested for cases where you have no choice but to link with a nonfree library: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html #GPLIncompatibleLibs

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[TheRaven64]

It always struck me as ironic that the GPL does not allow you to use or distribute derived copies of it.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Khelder]

Yes, the license is copyrighted, but so is every work licensed with the GPL. If a GPL'ed work weren't copyrighted, the GPL would have no force because people wouldn't need a license to use the work however they wanted.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're confused. As the gp said, works released under the GPL are copyrighted. This is fundamental to the GPL, and the GPL simply would not work if this were not the case. The GPL licenses pretty much everyone to do an extremely broad list of things with those copyrighted works, but the works themselves are and must remain copyrighted.

This is crucial to why the GPL was required in the first place. Anyone can make any work non-copyrighted (i.e. "public domain"). The trouble is that once something is in the public domain anyone can do anything they like with it, including making modifications and keeping the modified version completely proprietary.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[coolGuyZak]

It does, actually. The derived versions must not carry the "GPL" name, though. It's a similar situation for FireFox, with it's trademark license. Basically, that phrase is there to ensure branding. Otherwise, I could create and release a different "GPL" that could effectively lock people out of some of their rights.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[justins]

It does, actually. The derived versions must not carry the "GPL" name, though. It's a similar situation for FireFox, with it's trademark license. Basically, that phrase is there to ensure branding. Otherwise, I could create and release a different "GPL" that could effectively lock people out of some of their rights.

Every item asserted by the above paragraph is untrue. Just an FYI for the casual reader.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[onemorechip]

Who modded parent as "informative"?

Every item asserted by the above paragraph is untrue. Just an FYI for the casual reader.

I didn't find one untrue statement in gp's paragraph. From the FSF website:

You can use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar).

If I use some variation of GPL terms in another license, that license is a derivative of the GPL. Thus grandparent is correct in stating that:

It does [allow derivation], actually. -- This assertion is supported by the quoted statement; the derived version must meet the stated restrictions of course but it is still a derivative.

The derived versions must not carry the "GPL" name, though. -- Restates one of the restrictions; GPL refers to GNU so you can't call the modified license "GPL".

Basically, that phrase is there to ensure branding. -- I don't see anything that contradicts this assertion and it certainly is one justification, probably the strongest one.

Otherwise, I could create and release a different "GPL" that could effectively lock people out of some of their rights. -- Yes, if the restrictions weren't there he certainly could do that.

I'm not familiar with the licensing terms for Firefox and I haven't verified gp's statement about that.

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[coolGuyZak]

Evidence, perchance?

Re:GPL is Copyrighted too

[Random832]

Perfectly obvious? it's perfectly obvious why i can't make the "Random832 Public License" using it as a starting point?

HPUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

HPUX?....

Re:HPUX?

[HiThere]

That was my question. Did they respond by asking HP to GPL HPUX? Or possibly to put it under the reasonable alternative of BSD (without advertising clause)?

I'm sorry, but I don't think that HP has very much room to speak here. They've done some good things, but they've done many bad things, too. They'd be seen as as MPD as Sun, except that they are always careful to NOT advertise the bad things they do. (Sun is truly psychotic, given some of the things that it chooses to advertise. Doing that and then expecting people to like them is insane! HP doesn't advertise their vileness. Possibly it's no better as a company, but it's not clearly insane.)

HPUX Open Source!

[CPIMatt]

I guess this means that HP will distribute HPUX under the GPL from now on! Wooo Hooo!

(NOT!)

-Matt

Re:HPUX Open Source!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you are being funny, but out of curiosity I went to HP's open source site and followed to link to the first HP originated project I could find and here is their licensing stipulation (contained in the downloaded source distribution):

After HPIJS 1.0.1 the driver uses a BSD license. HPIJS 1.0 and below uses a BSD type license with a "HP product only" clause.

They also have other projects that are not licensed under the GPL.

So in all seriousness, HP appear to be hypocritical here.

Re:HPUX Open Source!

[Anonymous Coward]

Same applies to Tru64 ... right?

Copyrighted

[skarphace]

He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

This statement confuses the hell out of me. Are they saying that the GPL license is not copyrighted or that the software can not also be copyrighted?

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[tomstdenis]

I don't get this one though. I write open source software so people can use it. "leaching" is what they're doing by nature.

I mean how many Linux users really contribute back to the Kernel?

People used to be afraid of companies running off and locking people buying HW to a given OS.

Now because most OSS is written by kids [e.g. 25] they're just afraid of being left behind and not noticed.

The actual motives for a GPL or BSD or whatever license rarely has to do with the original goals.

Becase, really, if you want code to be just out there for folk to use you could make it public domain [like I do ;-)]

Tom

HP just figured it out

[cerelib]

The execs at HP just figured out that they do not have as good of software to offer and this is just a stupid ploy. Having non-GPL licenses is what is going to bring money and corporate interest to OS software. Some corporations will tell you that if any part of a product is GPL'ed they would not touch it with a 10 foot pole. Big business is afraid of "viral" OS licensing.

GPLd HP-UX ?

[garompa]

He is talking about Suns Common Development and Distribution License and suggesting changes to it, why doesn't he suggest to themself opening up HP-UX ?

Don't Forget Apple's APSL!

[billybob2]

Since we're giving a laundry list of companies that have invented their own licenses to ensure their code can't be used by open source projects under the GPL (most notably Linux), why not mention Apple and their APSL.

After all, the APSL has no advantages over the GPL or the LGPL, except that (from Apple's point of view) it prevents Linux from using the goodies in Darwin (such as the fast-booting Launchd).

Re:Don't Forget Apple's APSL!

[TheRaven64]

The APSL has a huge advantage over the GPL - it is per-file. You can APSL a source file and this has no effect whatever on the license of your entire work (unless you use a restrictive license like the GPL).

Re:Don't Forget Apple's APSL!

[Anonymous Coward]

The license doesn't prevent launchd from being re-written for linux, so I looked into it.

Sorry, I don't see any advantage there. XML config files ? Forget it -- eventually some idiot developer will have one that is huge, and parsing XML is not fast or lightweight.

The linux boot process is complecated and multi-layered, with init running shell scripts which follow links to run shell scripts that run wrappers to star the actual process. It could be cleaned up considerably. However, the slowness of linux booting isn't because of sh processing shell scripts, it's because too many things are launched serially that could be launched in parallel, and too many things are launched period.

I have the same feeling I had when I looked at ant as a replacement to make. So much wasted programming time . . . not just duplicated, wasted, because ant isn't as useful as make.

Anything licensed with the GPL is copyrighted

[Beolach]

"He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

Licensing something with the GPL does NOT remove copyright protection; quite the opposite, if it was not for copyright protection, the GPL could not make the restrictions it does: derivitive works must also be licensed with the GPL, etc. If a work is placed in the Public Domain (where it has no copyright), then anyone can do anything they want with it, with no restrictions whatsoever.

There is a lot of confusion...

[YA_Python_dev]

There is a lot of confusion around there about what exactly is open source, free, copyrighted and/or proprietary software.

I suggest to everyone to read the Free Software Definition and the FAQs about the GNU GPL.

Yeah, even if you don't like RMS read them: they are very informative!

Re:There is a lot of confusion...

[LizardKing]

There is a lot of confusion around there about what exactly is open source, free, copyrighted and/or proprietary software. I suggest to everyone to read the Free Software Definition and the FAQs about the GNU GPL.

That's not "free" it's "Free" - it only applies to the FSF use of the word. To paraphrase Nietszche, "there are freedoms but no freedom".

Sure, right after HP GPL's...

[kiick]

...HPUX and all those patents on printer cartridges.

Re:Sure, right after HP GPL's...

[rubycodez]

HP/UX is full of licensed Unix System V code and many other 3rd party proprietary code (like Veritas file system). never happen.

Re:Sure, right after HP GPL's...

[Creepy Crawler]

Exactly, and they own a shitload of patents themselves too. They could EASILY arrange a ownership/license change in which it COULD be allowed.

Now, for things like veritasFS, you simply have those as dirty modules. Linux supports that easily.

Free & Open Source != Public Domain

[Anonymous Coward]

"He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted."

From the context, the author seems to be saying the difference between IBM's open source software and GPLed software is that IBM's software is copyrighted.

GPLed software is copyrighted, too.

laptops

[rwven]

He also offered to buy all the VP's on their staff's laptops loaded with windows or linux if they did...

Jesus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pat your self on the back for an all-around pointless post.

Re:Jesus...

[LuciferBlack]

We will all follow your lead.

hypocrites

[noisymime]

somehow it doesn't seem fair for HP to ask this of IBM and SUN when they won't even let other people manufature replacement ink cartridges for their printers!

Re:hypocrites

[tomstdenis]

Two multinational mega-conglomerates walk into a bar. One says to the other "why so glum?" The other replies "People are finding out we're a total scam! We just don't have enough cleaners to take care of the whistle blowers." ... Or something like that ...

Dunno, my PC is built from parts all-over. None of which are HP, SUN or IBM. Yet I can crunch numbers with the best of them.

Sure if you're making a 1000 processor cluster you need something like IBM but for the average home user... no way.

And that's where the money is at y0.

Tom

Choice is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sourceforge restricts the open source licenses you can use to the ones listed by OSI. If the list has been just the ones you mentioned, I probably would not have put the project on Sourceforge. I have issues with GPL. Not what it means but how does it work in practice. I spoke with a FSF representative at a trade show and they (FSF) just don't seem to get it. So I voted with my feet on GPL.

Pot calling Kettle...

[knarfling]

They have some nerve telling other companies to give out free licencing.

My company that just purchased 3 computers from HP. There was a total of 5 dual core CPUs. We had to purchase 10 licences for HP-UX 11.11. Utilities that were an extra charge had to be purchased on a per CPU basis as well. A utility that cost $300 ended up costing $3000 even if it was only used on one machine. And they have the nerve to tell other companies to make their licences free???

HP, if you want others to change their licences, lead by example.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[billybob2]

I sympathise with your experience.

But HP is not being hypocritical, because they're not asking other companies to license their closed-source apps as Open Source. Rather, HP would like to see the apps that other companies already give out as Open Source be licensed under the most popular copyleft license, the GNU GPL.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Anonymous Coward]

So they can steal their work?

Seems like IBM and Sun have done the right thing if one of their big competitors thinks it's wrong. :)

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Ngwenya]

ObDisc: I work for HP, speaking here in a personal capacity, blah, blah, blah...

They have some nerve telling other companies to give out free licencing.

Be fair. Martin was simply saying that if IBM/Sun/HP/whoever is going to release software under a free license, then it would be preferable to release under a single, well known license - the GPL. HP's techies and lawyers tend to agree (in as much as techies ever agree about anything) that the GPL is the best way to give stuff to the free software community while protecting HP's intellectual investments. In other words, it will only give away stuff in the knowledge that some leech won't just take it and make the code non-free. And HP has released a lot of code under the GPL.

So he wasn't saying that Sun should open up everything including Java, or that IBM should free up AIX/Tivoli/etc or such things: just that the proliferation of licenses adds to market confusion.

Lastly, HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL. Case in point: HP licenses the SVR4 codebase, and I believe there is some ongoing litigation involving the contract conditions around that. Can't quite remember the company's name...

Scoff? Scold? Squelch?

--Ng

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Dan Ost]

And they have the nerve to tell other companies to make their licences free???

I believe HP was asking Sun and IBM to make their free software free in a more
standard way. I don't think HP was suggesting that Sun and IBM make free things
that currently aren't free.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[ak3ldama]

Sun Solaris 10 is also based on SVR4. But you probably knew that.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Ngwenya]

Sun Solaris 10 is also based on SVR4. But you probably knew that.

Yes, I did. But what I don't know is what Sun's contract language with AT&T/Novell/SCO states they can and can't do with it. SCO specifically stated that Sun was in the clear, which implies that they have a different contract term from the other SVR4 licensees. NB: I am not speaking from knowledge here - just pure speculation.

--Ng

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[msobkow]

Lastly, HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL.

And why would HP expect that this isn't an issue for Sun or IBM? IBM in particular has a huge patent portfolio that it uses as a negotiation chip when it wants to acquire technology from other companies that it doesn't want to buy outright. The technology (code and patent use) exchanged as part of the deal is still the property of the respective originators, so you can't relicense those components under the GPL.

As far as I know, even the open-source version of Solaris isn't the entire Solaris code base. Releasing the code base under the GPL might well prevent Sun from retaining ownership of the components it hasn't released, particularly if they rely on linking to the running kernel.

Besides, how long do you think the lifespan of a CEO would be if they turned over control of the licensing to a third party instead of relying on the corp's own legal team? Thats what happens with the GPL -- the terms are defined by the authors of the GPL, and they can change those terms with a new release of the license.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[amigabill]

Besides, how long do you think the lifespan of a
CEO would be if they turned over control of the
licensing to a third party instead of relying on the corp's own legal team? Thats what happens with the GPL -- the terms are defined by the authors of the GPL, and they can change those terms with a new release of the license.

But when you release something under one version of the GPL, you have indeed released under that particular version of the GPL. Newer versions of the GPL do not automatically change the terms of something released under a different version. So when GPL3 is completed, GPL2 things do not automatically update to GPL3 terms do they?

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Creepy Crawler]

--So when GPL3 is completed, GPL2 things do not automatically update to GPL3 terms do they?

They can, if and ONLY if, every person who touched even 1 bit of the code agrees.

If anybody disagrees with a license change (in a GPL type software), the only way to ignore them is by excising all of their code. Nobody wants to do that.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[slavemowgli]

If a piece of software is licensed specifically under the terms of the GPL v2 only, then of course, the license does not automatically get updated.

If a piece of software is licensed under the regular GPL (which says that you can also use the software under, "at your option, any later version"), then it does not automatically get updated, either, but others who work on GPL v3 projects can incorporate your code under the GPL v3. Similarly, you can decide to relicense your own project under the GPL v3 (with or without the "later versions" clause) without having to check with every past contributor, as the existing license already allows you to use the code under the new version of the license.

That being said, you wouldn't have to contact everyone who touched "even 1 bit of the code"; trivial contributions cannot be copyrighted. I don't know where the line is drawn (IANAL), and I'm not even sure there is a clear line, but things like trivial fixes (for example, typos etc.) are uncopyrightable.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Cyno]

Yeah? Well, you're stupid.

You paid for HPUX server here in 2005? WTF!?! Psycho.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun paid lots of money to SCO in order to extend their rights over the codebase before releasing it under the CDDL.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[justins]

Lastly, HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL. Case in point: HP licenses the SVR4 codebase, and I believe there is some ongoing litigation involving the contract conditions around that. Can't quite remember the company's name...

Scoff? Scold? Squelch?

Yeah, that really kept Sun from releasing their Unix as open source. Oh wait, it didn't.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[knarfling]

I realize that I may be feeding the trolls, but can you explain why that is so stupid?
Which machines / OS should I be using instead?
Since you know my business so well, can you tell me how I can get the custom application (which does not run in Linux, btw) ported to another OS without spending $300,000 in programming/development costs?
We actually did do some research on this and even tried to port this over to Linux. I really liked the idea of moving to Linux boxes. Unfortunately, the cost of porting to Linux was even greater that shelling out all that money for the HP boxes and the OS. So we chose the cheaper solution and that makes us stupid???
Just because it was better than the alternatives, doesn't mean I have to like their licensing.
And for all the others, I don't think that HP-UX should be free. HP does deserve to make some money. I just don't like having to pay more for each extra processor.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[farble1670]

"HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL"

sun managed to do it for solaris. i don't see any reason why hpux would be any different. yes, it's a lot of work, but if the company is committed to open source, it's possible.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[Cyno]

So who makes these decisions to buy closed source applications that only run HPUX? That's not dumb?

And yeah, it must suck to have to pay for each CPU. I'll never get myself stuck in your situation.

Its one thing if you absolutely NEED one custom app for your business and have to buy a special custom system to run it on. That's like a tool. But that should not be something you have to upgrade later. If you can't plan ahead when making purchasing decisions like this how can you possibly keep up with your competition?

Choosing the cheaper solution does not immediately make you intelligent. It makes you cheap. But you get what you pay for.

I know, you do something with this software only you can do and it makes you billions and you'll never have competition, blah, blah, blah. Oh, well.. at least its not my headache.

If I need a special purpose app that I couldn't write myself or buy for a well-supported and somewhat compatible/cross-platform OS, I'd at least consider the possibility of starting an open source project and see if I could drum up some interest at the university level.

There are many possibilities if you sit down and think for a minute before writing those checks. But maybe that's too far outside the box for the average business to reach.

Just "get it", already. Y'know, it doesn't take 40 trips on LSD to learn how to think creatively or social engineer your way around these kinds of commercial/capitalist pitfalls. If you assume everyone is out to screw you and take your money you might think that defending that money with your intelligence is worth some investment. Or not.

Its not HPUX I'm talking about, its closed-source commercial proprietary practices, like vendor lock-in and charging per-CPU or per-system or per-user licensing fees. Things that just don't make sense from any technical point of view. That's like charging you $1 for each drink you place on your coffee table after you've purchased it. But people will pay it. Suckers.

Re:Pot calling Kettle...

[NutscrapeSucks]

Just as an FYI, here's how the game is played -- HP wants to get rid of HPUX. Therefore, they will slowly and continually ratchet-up the costs of HP9000 (etc) systems until that $300K starts looking like a cheap option. If you are still holding out, they will eventually just discontinue the platform.

I'm not saying you made a bad choice by purchasing more 9000 hardware, just that sooner or later you will either pay $300K to port the app or you will abandon it. And in the meanwhile you are paying HP a lot of money.

HP-UX

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/operating/

Easy to ask IBM and SUN to change licenses.

[Ober]

But what has HP released lately under any license where we had access to source code?
HPUX source code going to be released under any kind of license soon?
Pure bullshit postering imho.

OSS, not OS

[Jim Hall]

Can we please refer to Open Source either using the phrase "Open Source" or with the abbreviation "OSS"?? The "OS" usually stands for "Operating System".

So the headline of this article read to me like "HP calls for Sun and IBM to remove Operating System licenses" which is completely different from what the article was about.

</soapbox>

Re:OSS, not OS

[Luke-Jr]

Or, rather, how about using the adjective free which correctly describes the licensing terms? Technically, "open" would simply mean you can see the code-- not necessarily that you can modify or share it.

Also, note that OSS is the Open Sound System.

Re:OSS, not OS

[coolGuyZak]

I, for one, would appreciate the fully disambigous term: free software, meaning free as in speech, not free as in beer. The handy acronym is the following: FSMFSNFB. I find that when one says it quickly enough, it rolls right off the tounge.

Re:OSS, not OS

[justins]

Can we please refer to Open Source either using the phrase "Open Source" or with the abbreviation "OSS"?? The "OS" usually stands for "Operating System".

Okay, here's a pet peeve. "OSS" refers to a variety of audio drivers. It's going to need to continue doing that even if we manage to get most people to use "OSS" as an acronym for Open Source Software. So maybe we should reconsider...

Re:OSS, not OS

[BillyBlaze]

One alternative is Free/Libre Open Source Software - FLOSS. I can't think of anything that would conflict with ;-)

Re:OSS, not OS

[Luke-Jr]

There is no ambiguity in English. "Free as in beer" is not what "free" means-- the word you want there is "gratis".

Re:OSS, not OS

[coolGuyZak]

According to Mirriam-Webster:

" 10 : not costing or charging anything"

I regret to inform you, sir, that you are wrong. I would have used OED... unfortuantely, it is not a free resource.

Re:OSS, not OS

[Luke-Jr]

Then at least don't use M-W, which has in some cases the exact opposite definition for words. Besides, I suspect M-W only tries to be an American dictionary, not an English one.

Re:OSS, not OS

[coolGuyZak]

This may surprise you, but Americans speak English. "American", as you speak of it above, is just a dialect of English.

Another thing that may surprise you: language evolves. Most people understand that the vernacular use of a term is not incorrect. I find it rather tiresome that people to use the terms Linux, hacker, and ignorant incorrectly. However, I understand that as long as one is communicating, it doesn't particularly matter how that communication occurs.

Basically, sematical arguments waste my time more than /. does... and that is saying something. I normally don't reply to semantical bullshit... and I'm not really sure why I am still replying here.

Re:OSS, not OS

[Luke-Jr]

Call it American English if you like, it's still not primary (aka British) English. Sure, I can put up with incorrect use of Linux, hacker, etc like you mention, but when it causes confusion with a more correct meaning, that's even more annoying.

A far more interesting story

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Yahoo buys a billion worth of a chinese internet company...

Or possibly this story about tourists being offered a chance to fly around the moon for 100 million.

Sigh. Maybe its in the mysterious future, but I just don't know what slashdot is coming to these days... It ain't what it used to be.

Re:A far more interesting story

[lucabrasi999]

I just don't know what slashdot is coming to these days... It ain't what it used to be.

Wow, these kind of sentiments, and your User ID is 707389? What time frame do you believe constitutes the "Good Old Days" of Slashdot, last week?

:)

Re:A far more interesting story

[Christianfreak]

Well at risk of getting into a low UID war (hey mine's just over 100k!!!) I'll have to say even though the OP has a high UID he is quite correct. /. is becomming more about the "bad stuff" that's going to take away all our freedom than it is about cool technology anymore. Personally I feel the tipping point was the Napster case.

Sad.

Re:A far more interesting story

[mcc]

Or possibly this story about tourists being offered a chance to fly around the moon for 100 million.

Slashdot's run a story about that already. In fact, I'm pretty sure they've run multiple dupes of a story about that already.

Re:A far more interesting story

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the "bad stuff" matters. It is important, and affects all of us. Since slashdot's tagline includes the phrase "stuff that matters," I think these stories fit.

Perhaps there should ALSO be more stories about cool technology (you know...the "news for nerds" bit...) but I don't think that there should be fewer political/social/economic stories.

Re:A far more interesting story

[digitalunity]

Low UID?

I win.

Re:A far more interesting story

[IpalindromeI]

Well, using this guy's data and extrapolating, uid 707389 was probably created around late August 2003. Your uid is only about a year older.

Anyway, two years is a pretty long time. And Slashdot has gotten markedly worse in those two years.

Re:A far more interesting story

[Forge]

Yahwn.

Slashdot has always been like this. In fact the bigest change is that these days, some stories have better spelling than my coments.

Re:A far more interesting story

[typical]

Some of us like to switch to new accounts now and then.

Re:A far more interesting story

[Wiz]

No, you fail it!

GPLed Software Not Copyrighted?

[pete-classic]

He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License [. . .] In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

I guess the hardest part of journalism school is learning to talk out of ones ass.

For those who, like this reporter, don't know: Any material must be under copyright for the GPL to apply.

J.T.F.C.

-Peter

Re:GPLed Software Not Copyrighted?

[Bogtha]

I guess the hardest part of journalism school is learning to talk out of ones ass.

On the contrary, I think some people just have a natural talent for it.

Re:GPLed Software Not Copyrighted?

[Saint Aardvark]

I agree. The rest of the article was pretty
piss-poor writing, too; a sentence like:

For instance, he cited Oracle's On Demand
Center in Austin, Texas, which comprises 10,000
servers and 2.5-petabytes of storage, runs
Linux.

should never make it past the editor.

Copyrighted?

[RealProgrammer]

He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License [...]. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

Whoever wrote that doesn't appear to know what "copyrighted" means.

The GPL is "copyrighted", too. Software published under the GPL or IBM's license or Creative Commons or Microsoft's EULA* is copyrighted. Almost everything is copyrighted, except things which have been put or have at last fallen into the public domain.

The license you publish under just tells the user what they can do with your copyrighted work. It doesn't change the fact that it's still copyrighted.

* Really more of a contract than a license.

Translation:

[Gothmolly]

We're fresh out of ideas, viz. we killed the instrumentation market, we EOLed our CPU, we EOLed our OS on said CPU, we lost the laser printer edge, and the PC market's margins are so thin we're bleeding to death.
Can we have some of your ideas?
Maybe HP should go down in flames, as a warning to other companies.

Re:Translation:

[filesiteguy]

Noooo!

I still need support for my HP-12c. :)

Hey, maybe the software for that could be under the GPL.

Actually as IBM/SUN/HP are all part of the OSDL, they should get their acts togeter and agree on a common license. That would be my opinion. Of course, we could all just continue to drop our pants and bend over for Bill the Gates...

BSD's okay...

[Svartalf]

But does NOTHING to prohibit proprietarization. People can USE your programs under the GPL all they want- they don't have their hands tied. It's when they modify it that they might, and I say MIGHT have their hands tied. As far as I'm concerned, they can have their hands tied in that regard- namely if you use this as the base for your stuff, you need to be able to give your stuff back. That's the price of admission- pure and simple.

Sadly so many BSD advocates just don't get this concept. It's not that your hands are tied per se, it's that you can't just arbitrarily go and reuse the code without paying up by way of your sharing. In my book this is just fine- and it's how most of the work I do in the FOSS world is licensed- either GPL or LGPL.

HP should be the first

[Anonymous Coward]

HP should first release their own OSs (HP/UX, True64, VMS) under an open source license (and GPL would be great) before asking his competitors to do so

why am I not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

This story seems like it was about to happen for quite some time.
In an interview with Jeremy Allison (http://us1.samba.org/samba/news/articles/lu46-all ison.pdf):

- the HP lawyer completely understands the licences, and as he's put it to me, 'There's nothing you can't do with a combination of GPL, LGPL, MIT or BSD. Any business objective you can achieve with those.' You don't need the HP Public Licence 1.7 or whatever.

Same for HP-UX and Tru64?

[swamp boy]

Just wondering if he thinks that his company's operating systems should be in the same boat. No, I didn't RTFA (yet).

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[ccbailey]

I don't think people equate leaching and use in this context; at least I don't. When you LGPL software you're encouraging people to use it. You're making it available at no cost and opening up the source for everyone to see.

I would consider a leech to be an individual or organization who took your code, closed it, modified it, and sold it back to you. Personally I would find that irksome (as I imagine many people, 25 or otherwise, would) which is precisely why I enjoy the sort of "protection" afforded by the (L)GPL.

Just to be clear...

[drakaan]

"He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted..."

Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think that's the case this time around, copyright remains in effect under the GPL. All it is is a license that says you have more rights than those permitted under copyright law as long as you abide by the terms of the license.

...unless he's actually saying that IBM's license, itself, is copyrighted (which doesn't seem like what was being compared).

Re:Just to be clear...

[RGRistroph]

The GPL, itself, is copyrighted, so that still doesn't make a "contrast" between the GPL and IBM.

Re:Just to be clear...

[drakaan]

Right...I was just saying that drawing attention to [the two licences both being copyrighted] didn't seem to be the point of the statement (and is also not a difference).

Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't trust him, he's a fink!

hp hardware compatibility

[jgilbert]

when all of hp's new hardware is linux compatible, i'll quit ignoring their lip service. they don't have to support linux on the hardware. just don't use linux hostile components. for example, the broadcom wireless chipset in the lance armstrong special edition notebook.

btw, they lost at least one sale because of it.

Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Well, it happens that not everyone is convinced that they should give up as much control as Our Fatherly Leader Richard Stallman thinks they should. That's why many people choose a BSD or MIT style Open Source license. In many ways, the GPL cuts its own throat by not recognizing that not everyone is a diehard socialist. In other words, the GPL has too much ideology in it for some people. Thus, they can maintain some control over their code while allowing others to benefit from its openness, by using a BSD type license. In other news, HP would like Sun and IBM to GPL their intellectual property because HP no longer does R and D...

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU FAIL IT (it is trolling)
YOU FAIL IT (it is spelling)
YOU FAIL IT (it is 'jour' not 'jur')

FAILURE IS YOURS

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[natrius]

Thus, they can maintain some control over their code while allowing others to benefit from its openness, by using a BSD type license.

Um... how does using a BSD type license help you keep control over your code when compared to the GPL? You don't lose any control with the GPL. You do, however, gain more bugfixes and features added to your code by people who use it.

People like to yell about how BSD is more free and GPL users are socialists, but you've got it all backwards. When you license your code under a BSD type license, you're letting anyone use the code, no questions asked, and hoping that the goodness in their hearts will compel them to contribute fixes back to you. If that's not idealistic, I don't know what is. When I release my code under the GPL, I know that doing so will lead to better code. I'll get more contributions back, because people have to. That makes me feel like I have some control over the code, so I don't know what you're talking about.

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

You do, however, gain more bugfixes and features added to your code by people who use it.

How does a BSD license prevent this exactly?

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[zero time ghost]

He didn't say BSD prevents it. He's saying the GPL guarantees it.

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[muuh-gnu]

> How does a BSD license prevent this exactly?

By people not willing to work on code which can be closed up and made propriatery and people denied free access to it by its next best distributor.

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[JavaRob]

I think you mean "du jour", but whatever. Are you trolling or do you just not know much about these licenses?

The BSD license give you almost ZERO control over your code -- it basically says "use this for whatever you want, modify it and redistribute it in binary-only form under a proprietary license if you want... you just have to show our copyright notice along with it."

The GPL says "use this internally for whatever you want, but if you distribute it you have to include the full source code for whatever you're distributing, and anyone you give/sell it to must have the right to distribute it THEMSELVES under this same license, for free if they want".

See? With the GPL you have more control over your code, because it's harder for other people to make money off of it, and if they do you get back the improvements they made.

This is not "diehard socialism", it's using the strength of copyright (based on PERSONAL OWNERSHIP) to sell your code -- but instead of asking money you demand access to all improvements other folks want to distribute.

Okay? I really hope I'm not wasting my time on a troll, but there are obviously people out there who don't understand this stuff (case in point -- your post modded up...).

Re:Hosre Crap-ola de Jur

[Alsee]

Please explainwhy you advocate BSD and explain why anyone would ever want to use it.

If what you want is programmers to throw their work into the public domain then come right out and say that.

-

no one-size fits all

[cahiha]

I think between GPL, LGPL, and BSD, we have pretty much all the bases covered in terms of different kinds open source license terms.

However, BSD alone is not enough to cover all the needs of open source software. I have made available code under all three licenses, depending on what objectives I had in mind. Just because you think that BSD works for your project doesn't mean that it works for all projects. People who pick the GPL generally do so deliberately and after a lot of thought, and the success of GPL-licensed projects shows that the model works well for some projects.

Wasted effort

[bogaboga]

While I welcome the goals of the executive from HP, I just beg him to have more patience. The two companies he mentions will [soon] discover that their licences are not managing to have them cut it. I do not know of any company that has done what a rival has wanted it to. Otherwise SUN would have released java under the GPL long ago.

By the way, the executive would have taken this chance to announce that HP has placed all its software under the GPL that he seems to worship. Of course he didn't. Why? Because HP is afraid of taking that very important first step. What happened to "leading by example?"

Free HP machines for everybody

[Jeff Hornby]

It sounds like HP is forgetting that these other companies are businesses and therefore have to make business decisions.

If IBM and Sun saw a competitive advantage in releasing their code under the GPL, they would. It would be cheaper for them that way as they wouldn't have had to pay a bunch of lawyers to write up their current licensing schemes.

Whether it is a mindshare advantage, a market position adavantage or whatever, these companies believe that their licenses make them more money.

Asking them to relinquish this competitive advantage would be like asking HP to give away their hardware for free. In fact, in the interest of furthering the free software movement, I call on HP to start the free hardware movement: start giving away all HP machines (desktops, laptops, servers, printers, printer cartridges, etc.) for free in order to benefit the free hardware

Of geese and ganders

[twd]

I wonder, is HP going to be consistent, and do the same thing for HP-UX that they are asking Sun to do for Solaris?

Fink confused on licenses

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

It does, overall, seem like a silly stunt to get attention for HP (who hardly uses GPL universally--or even widely--themselves).

However, the devil is in the details. I agree that Sun's CDDL is a mess, and replacing it with GPL would be great. Or with BSD. Or with MPL or IBM's PL. But IBM's license is quite good--in fact, probably better than GPL at this point, since it deals with patents, requiring non-discriminatory treatment by patent holders. IBM's PL is most certainly a Free Software license, as well as being OSI approved.

I'm aware that GPL 3.x will probably have some long-needed patent coverage. And it's quite possible that Eben Moglen and friends will even (someday) come up with something I like better than IBM's language. But the last I heard is that we're talking about 2007 before GPL 3 actually exists. IBM should hardly throw away a perfectly good licensing approach today under the hope that GPL 3 might give them something better in 2007.

Admittedly, IBM does not license ALL its software as IBM PL. But it's a lot farther along the right road than HP is.

Re:Fink confused on licenses

[jiushao]

CDDL a mess? It is just the Mozilla Public License 1.1 with the word "Mozilla" replaced by "covered software". It is old, established and is both an approved OSI license and a Free Software license approved by the FSF. Sure, it is GPL-incompatible, but so is the IBM Public License.

I have no idea how Sun ended up hated by Slashdot. They sell Linux, they open-sourced the Solaris kernel, they have cooperated with OSS operating systems to get them running on their hardware. Lets not forget a huge donation in the form of buying StarOffice and immediately open-sourcing it. The completely open and royalty-free SPARC architecture (as opposed to the far-from-open PPC). Few companies have done more.

There have been some back and forth on how they perceive Linux, but considering that Linux has been eating Sun's marketshare quickly the last decade they sure seem to have a very good relationship with Linux and related technologies.

Re:Fink confused on licenses

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

Our good old Groklaw had a rather extensive discussion of the differences between MPL1.1 and CDDL. The short story is that more than the one word was changed. The medium story is that the changes may actually contain a trap around patents.

For the full story, take a look at:

    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200412050 23636236

Re:Fink confused on licenses

[Russ Nelson]

If the CDDL is a mess, then so is the MPL, because they're 95% identical. Firefox uses the MPL, so it's a fairly important license.
-russ

Re:Fink confused on licenses

[jiushao]

Ah. What I get for doing poor research, in my defense a lot of sites around the net do claim that it is a very straight MPL.

In a slightly unrelated notice I would say that the CDDL changes seem very appropriate. While software patents are in themselves a bad idea it is not reasonable to let the license encompass patent claims against arbitrary other software. It does not matter a whole lot to open source projects or companies either since they won't deal with software outside the license scope anyway.

I will admit that this is a whole lot more subjective and my original post was wrong. I personally feel that the CDDL is very reasonable anyway however.

Re:Fink confused on licenses

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

In a legal contract, changing the right (or wrong) 5% of the language can make a REALLY BIG difference.

The problem lies in...

[Svartalf]

...that the BSD license is more often than not the wrong tool for the job as is the MIT/X11 and Artistic Licenses.

So many proponents of the BSD license seem to think that it's a magic bullet for everything and insist in BSDing all the code. For example, in the case of the discussion here, someone suggested that they BSD the stuff from IBM and Sun- because it was a better license for everything so that people wouldn't have their hands tied with use.

This is so dead wrong it's tragic.

In this case, you'd want to GPL or LGPL the stuff in question because of the VERY thing you said in your comment- control over the source code is much more important than re-inventing the wheel for most of that stuff. But there goes someone suggesting that we BSD it- again.

In another case, while I don't 100% agree with the decision, I do believe that it's a valid rationale for doing a BSD license- Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis. In this instance, these are only reference implementations of a transport format and an audio and video codec respectively. In order to proliferate the formats in question, the stuff's licensed under the BSD to encourage people to USE the format in question. That's cool so long as people don't do a bait and switch like MS is so wont to do- because it's better than most and it's a little harder a sell with an LGPLed reference implementation (because so many idiots want to prohibit reverse engineering in their license or because someone legitimately needs to statically link the libraries in question...). That's a legitimate use of the BSD license on something.

And lest it be said that I'm biased, I've willingly released code under the MIT/X11 license when I worked on the Utah-GLX codebase. It's not a license snobbery issue- it's an issue of so many people insisting on using the "wrong" license in so many cases.

Re:The problem lies in...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only justification for using the GPL over the BSD license in my opinion is if someone actually releases code that wouldn't have been released under a BSD license. Where are the examples?

There are many examples of the use of BSD code where the code may not have been used were it GPL. The famous TCP/IP stack, for instance. Many of those uses were indeed commercial.

Which reveals the real goal for many GPL advocates: to prevent non-GPL companies from using code. That sounds a lot more like bitterness than altruism.

This just pisses me off!

[ratboy666]

Ok, now we have HP taking pot shots at SUN and IBM.

Yes, HP /has/ given to the community, but in no way as much as IBM and SUN. NFS? SUN OpenOffice? SUN, Solaris 10? SUN (let's see HP open-source HPUX).

Before HP opens its yap, I want to see the source for HPUX, and CDE.

You know, that OS where you can't use local variables named "u" in kernel code (just like 30 year old Unix).

But NOOO - HP feels they must shoot at IBM and SUN for the (Open Source approved) LICENSE -- AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY CLAPPED?!?!?

Ratboy

Re:This just pisses me off!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the source code to HPUX, and believe me, you wouldn't want to use it.

Hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the creator of a work that determines the conditions under which it may be shared, copied, modified, etc. For someone else to tell them how they should do it is complete hogwash. The GPL is a fine license, but it is not everyone's choice. Others have to respect the choce of the license holder.

Competitors?

[phorm]

In some ways the above three work together, and in some ways they're competitors. Why should anyone lend credence to anything HP tells its competitors to do... how about we wait to hear what HP is going to do to make their products open-source... or how about getting the manufacturers of the wireless chipset and/or cardreader in my HP laptop to release an OS-driver for linux? No, I thought not.

If MS declared that Apple should open-source more of their offerings would it make news? Maybe only so we can laugh at them... which is about all we should be doing at HP right now

Re:Competitors?

[drew]

The HP guy wasn't saying that IBM and Sun should open source their proprietary software products. He merely said that in order to reduce confusion, when IBM and Sun release do release programs as Open Source, they should use an existing Free/Open source license like the GPL, rather than the CDDL or whatever IBM's Open Source license is. So he is not in any way asking them to do something that HP doesn't already do.

(I agree with another poster that the headline would have been much clearer if they had said "HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OSS Licenses" rather than "HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OS Licenses".)

General Public Liscense (GPL)

[fish_in_the_c]

Did the writer / author / speaker use a wrong word or was this fellow talking about something other then the GNU Public Liscense( GPL )? Has thier been a name change I missed out on?

Sorry for my ignorage.

Re:General Public Liscense (GPL)

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is called the General Public License, also refferred to as the GNU General Public License. Thats why you sometimes see 'GNU GPL' (they aren't being redundant).

Re:General Public Liscense (GPL)

[Luke-Jr]

The GPL has always been the General Public License. Hence why it's not repetitious to talk about the GNU GPL.

OpenSolaris CDDL FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

The CDDL is a genericized version of the MPL (Mozilla Public License).

Here's a link to the CDDL FAQ.

The GPL license is not very attractive to many commercial software companies, and may also conflict with other contracts that they are already bound to.

Yes. Sun chose the Common Development and Distribution License because the GPL would not allow Sun and others to freely redistribute OpenSolaris in its entirety. Due to third party licensing concerns not all of Solaris could be GPLed and the GNU Public License essentially requires all linked components to be GPLed.

Re:OpenSolaris CDDL FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

The CDDL is a genericized version of the MPL (Mozilla Public License).

Modified with several opaque patent clauses that Sun really would rather not talk about, but when forced to will mutter, splutter and cough about them being "necessary".

This whole rush to open source by Sun (and indeed IBM) is rather transparently nasty -- both of those organisations know very well that their efforts towards trusted computing will ensure that *their* and only their versions of the operating system (whatever it is, OpenSolaris etc) will be the ones to run on their hardware, making the whole open source idea meaningless. Both IBM and Sun are enthusiastic supporters of the whole Trusted Computing Platform and DRM in particular.

Re:OpenSolaris CDDL FAQ

[ArtDent]

IBM has no "their" version of an open source operating system. The only open source operating system that IBM has committed significant resources to is Linux, which is GPL'ed, and of which they don't actually produce a distribution.

The typical example of the IBM-backed project with a "non-standard" license is Eclipse, which has nothing to do with DRM.

I really have no idea if your comments are fair to Sun or not, but if so, I think you're unfairly painting IBM with the same brush.

Re:OpenSolaris CDDL FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM sells linux systems -- and Linux running on a trusted computing platform will need to be cryptographically signed. Trusted computing creates an "IBM linux" -- and IBM is one of the main driving forces behind Trusted Computing.

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[l3v1]

Becase, really, if you want code to be just out there for folk to use you could make it public domain

Yes, to use, not to sell, without having been no contribution initially. Now that's what leeching is IMO.

Sun won't GPL Solaris

[olivercromwell]

Asking Sun to GPL SOlaris will never fly. Why? Even if they wanted to, they couldn't, as Solaris is basically an System V release, and we know how SCO feels about GPL, Linux, and so called leaking of SVRx code into Linux. Sun is a licencee, and if they did release the kernel code, they would be hooped. Same goes for HP with HP-UX, and IBM with AIX. Until the SVR code is GPL'd, no Unix based on SVR will every be GPL'd, regardless of who actually owns the copyright to the code.

The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[khasim]

The GPL license is not very attractive to many commercial software companies, and may also conflict with other contracts that they are already bound to.

It may, but it should not if it is only the OS.

In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors. The BSD TCI/IP stack should be a sufficient example.

I can see that for apps running on the OS, but not for the OS itself or components of it (as with your TCP/IP stack example).

For a commodity OS, developed by many, used by many and owned by none, the GPL is the best license out there. Under the BSD license, we could see a "splintering" of the OS exactly as we did with the old *nixes. Under the GPL, that is impossible.

I believe that is why so many different companies are pushing Linux now. They don't have to put the massive amounts of time/money into it to stay competitive with the other OS's, yet it cannot be taken from them by the owner AND they are as involved in the development as if it were their very own.

If the goal is a commodity OS, then the GPL is the best license.

If the goal is something else, then other licenses may be better.

Re:The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[Ded Bob]

For a commodity OS, developed by many, used by many and owned by none, the GPL is the best license out there.

I disagree.

Under the BSD license, we could see a "splintering" of the OS exactly as we did with the old *nixes. Under the GPL, that is impossible.

We could see a splintering (or forking) of any OS under the GPL too. Both licenses allow the OS to be changed, therefore, the GPL does not prevent splintering.

Re:The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[dkf]

For a commodity OS, developed by many, used by many and owned by none, the GPL is the best license out there. Under the BSD license, we could see a "splintering" of the OS exactly as we did with the old *nixes. Under the GPL, that is impossible.

So the number of different Linux distros with subtle differences between them are a figment of my imagination then?

Re:The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[Lars T.]

Under the BSD license, we could see a "splintering" of the OS exactly as we did with the old *nixes. Under the GPL, that is impossible.

Yeah, under the GPL we only see something called GNU/forking, which is just great.

Re:The GPL is great for a commodity OS.

[Stephen Samuel]

Methinks he's talking about a splintering of proprietary OS versions. It's generally believed that the bulk of SCO's beloved Unix came from the (original) BSD code base -- which they then modified and redistributed under a proprietary license. Subsequent manufacturers then created their own proprietary versions, and never the twain shall meet.

With a GPL license, Linus et. al. will always have the right to 'fold in' any interesting changes created by IBM, Red Hat, or whomever. This is a structural feature which helps to prevent destructive splintering and ensures a rapid growth of the product.

Misleading article title.

[Picass0]

Zonk or whoever titled the story creates the impression at a glance the HP is trying to convince IBM & Sun to go to a closed source lincense. The title is 180 degrees removed from the real storyline - HP is attempting to get IBM & Sun to completely switch to a GPL license.

When Martin Fink talks...

[HisMother]

... well, actually, nobody listens.

YES

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad to see millions and millions of lines of code rotting in it's own hell even though it is free - If everything was GPL, just think how much OpenSolaris and Linux could benefit from each other. But now as the state of affairs is - no one can benefit from the humongous efforts already taken by the other - every one has to reinvent his own wheel.

To GPL or not to GPL ...

[PhilipPeake]

Lets start with HP's comments. as has been mentioned here before, I don't see HP making any great effort to apply the GPL to their code, which is strange if its such a wonderful thing. This seems more like posturing than anything else.

A much more reasonable request of IBM and Sun might be to ask them (note: not DEMAND!) to consider dual licensing. Obviously they see some advantage to their licences, and presumably they thnk their users do too, so lets see which license people adopt. Its not unreasonable to require that users of their code state at the time of aquiring the code which license they are aquiring under -- no picking the license to match the circumstances -- make people think about what they are doing.

As to the question of which is the world's most wonderful OSS license, well, I have some personal reservations about GPL -- which doen't mean that I don't think that the GPL does not have its place, and that it couldn't be improved.

That said, I also have a lot of sympathy for the point of view expressed by Pamela Jones when she says that it is the GPL and only the GPL that has destroyed the pirate raids of SCO and put them into a defensive mode, trying to defend the indefensible. She is right. The GPL did the world a huge favor here.

Does that mean the GPL could not be made somewhat more flexible? Well, we will see when GPL 3.0 sees the light of day.

Self interest

[rumblin'rabbit]

In general, people must be motivated or forced to do the right thing,

Well there's a healthy attitude.

Do you think companies are contributing to the GPL because they are forced to? Naw. They are contributing to open source software because it's in their best interest to do so.

For example, many large companies (eg, IBM) would like to develop their products for a popular operating system that is not under the control of a competing company. They don't want to be held hostage to MS.

As well, many companies would like to see improvements in an operating system everyone is using, without getting into the messy business of licensing operating systems themselves.

Also many companies might release software to the open source community for public relations purposes, or as perks for their employees.

They make Linux improvements under GPL because that's what Linux is under. But if was under some other license they still do it because it serves their purposes.

A major result of economics is that self-interest often works to the benefit of all. This is a case in point.

Re:Self interest

[arose]

Do you think companies are contributing to the GPL because they are forced to? Naw. They are contributing to open source software because it's in their best interest to do so.

That's the 'motivated' part.

Re:Self interest

[rumblin'rabbit]

I was addressing the "forced" part.

To say people do things because they have a reason for doing so is a bit of tautology, don't you think?

Re:Self interest

[arose]

He didn't say that forcing is the only way, did he? The GPL can do both IMHO.

When HP makes some substantial...

[stox]

contributions to open source, they will have a leg to stand on. As it stands right now, I know of none. Their use of open source has been almost purely parasitic.

Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Re:When HP makes some substantial...

[Anonymous Coward]

HP have not contributed as much source as the other companies, but HP is a major supporter abd helper of Linux and other open source projects. For example, they by a large margin sell and support the most Linux based servers of all vendors.

Their use is certainly not parasitic, you are clueless there, but you are partly right about the contribution.

Re:When HP makes some substantial...

[ficken]

Good call...at least they are trying
---
Samba: Reverse engineering M$ products since 1991.
---
Why buy software when all you need is OSS ?
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey

Re:When HP makes some substantial...

[Anonymous Coward]

Many HP employees are members of the Debian development community.
- Paul Bame, Dann Frazier, Bdale Garbee, Eric Schwartz, Al Stone, Matt Taggart, and Matthew Wilcox among others are "Debian Developers"
- HP hosts several iimportant servers for the Debian project, including gluck.debian.org, a full primary mirror (85GB); merkel.debian.org and merulo.debian.org, ia64 development systems; and paer.debian.org, a hppa development system.
- HP has donated additional systems to the Debian project that are used for infrastructure and pporting efforts
- HP uses Debian as its internal development platform
- HP Linux Inkjet Driver project

and many more http://opensource.hp.com/opensource_projects.html [hp.com].

Re:When HP makes some substantial...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let me get this straight... a company that sells hardware that runs Linux, but does nothing else for the community, is a major supporter and helper. A company that is the largest commercial contributor of code to the Open Source community is reviled?

I must live in a backwards universe.

Re:When HP makes some substantial...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you had taken the time to read through the web site and do a little research, you would have found out that HP employs over a dozen programmers to produce open source code. They have contributed quite a bit of code and applications to the open source movement. They even have a lab dedicated to writing open source software. HP has done a lot, they just don't toot their horn about it and run commercials on tv like another company. Truth be known, I trust HP more than the other company with Linux's future. Their future absolutely rides on Linux (HP/UX and PA-RISC is done for), unlike the other company.

YOU FAIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you have something better to do?

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[TheRaven64]

The problem have with the BSD license is that a company can extend your code and make a product more attractive than yours. They can then distribute this binary-only. I don't really understand why this is a problem - it's not like my code goes away because it has a competitor - it might even motivate development more.

When I write code, I want as many people as possible to be able to use it, so I choose the BSD license[1]. If someone makes a closed-source product out of it then their customers will benefit from using my code (which will be tested by both my users and the company in question, so should be more stable than if the company had re-invented the wheel) at the expense of freedom (largely from vendor lock-in. I don't consider this trade-off to be worthwhile (I live more in the Free Software than the Open Source camp), but if other people do then that's up to them.

[1] I'm also egocentric, so I pick a license which requires attribution.

Question is, what else will come from...

[Anonymous Coward]

HP and The Dirty Little Mind Of Martin Fink???

:-)

Are you sure?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

You are ignoring Zonk's wonderful stories. How can you say such thing about a site where cunnilingus and video games is seriously discussed?

benifit yourself. With a spell checker.

[oldwarrior]

benifit yourself.
How do you benifit yourself? (ibid)

Good for the Goose, or just plain evil???

[doublem]

Well, it's pretty clear HP is saying "Do what I say, not what I do" to it's competitors.

I can see the board meeting now.

Jack: How can we get out competition to waste resources?

Jill: Get them embroiled in a series of drawn out legal battles?

Jack: Brilliant! But How???

Jill: Wait a second. Have you been keeping up with the SCO news...

It's a simple plan really. Shame our competitors to open source a bunch of code, and prod the right parties to start a few lawsuits over the ownership of said code.

If they do a proper code audit, they'll end up wasting resources rewriting thousands to millions of lines of code to remove proprietary, NDA or licensed technologies.

GPL'd Ax

[oldwarrior]

more like - you are free to use the ax to build homes that people can live in for free, or maybe even create a happy group commune with open marriages but don't you dare try to sell any of the fruits of YOUR labor since my Ax get's all the credit.

Re:GPL'd Ax

[Anonymous Coward]

more like - you are free to use the ax to build homes that people can live in for free, or maybe even create a happy group commune with open marriages but don't you dare try to sell any of the fruits of YOUR labor since my Ax get's all the credit.

If I do apply those conditions to use of my ax then do you feel that there's anything wrong with that?

Re:GPL'd Ax

[oldwarrior]

Not making any judgements just illustrating the situation as I see it for the clarification and edification of others. Some might think that more benefit would come if the Ax had no strings attached but others might view the ultimate goal of free housing as a greater good. Just differing goals of differing onlookers. GPL and BSD are right for differning sorts of folks. Neither sort should claim moral superiority.

why doesn't HP open source HP-UX itself then?

[test007]

If HP is so in love with the GPL why don't they GPL HP-UX? I know that they problably have licenced code from other companies but so have Sun and IBM. It's easy to criticize others than contribute yourself. Sun and IBM have their reasons for choosing a particular licence (software patents for instance).

Re:why doesn't HP open source HP-UX itself then?

[Funks]

They probably can't.. Most likely due to some UNIX restrictions.

Novell needs to release the UNIX license to GPL.

A cold day in hell...

[azemute]

Next thing you know, Apple will be insiting Windows Vista be licensed under the GPL.

HP-UX

[Anonymous Coward]

So where is the GPL-ed HP-UX source?

Call for GPL is fine, a correction, and on equity.

[jbn-o]

Overall, I'm glad to see more people encouraging the use of the GNU General Public License (GPL). No matter what their philosophical leaning, it helps me as a GPL licensor to have more source code to share and modify. There are two issues I'd like to comment on, one a correction and the other a general comment on one theme in the article. From the article:

"He asked IBM to deprecate its open-source license and instead put it under the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to modify and improve it and distribute copies. In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted."

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is also copyrighted. The copyright for the GPL is held by its author, the Free Software Foundation, and this is clearly announced in the text of the GPL. So, the second sentence of theirs makes no sense because there is no contrast to speak of.

Generally, the proliferation of licenses is a burden in and of itself. Some of the reason for this has to do with the weaker standards of the Open Source Initiative, which allow more licenses to become OSI-approved. But I think the desire of businesses to get free labor is another factor which can't be ignored. Businesses distribute their code under a license which allows the business more flexibility to do things with contributed code than what contributors can do with the code copyrighted to the business. This inequity was a problem with the early releases of the Apple Public Source License. By contrast, the equity between copyright holders and contributors under the GPL is part of the reason why the GPL became so popular.

Does this mean HP-UX is getting GPL'd?

[licketyspit]

You know I hear this banter back and forth between Sun, IBM and HP. They all want the other to gpl something, but when it comes to their software cash cows (I'm not talking about the stuff they don't make any money off of) all I hear is chirping crickets. This "announcement" is nothing new, and frankly starting to bore me.

Re:How about IBM and Sun just not list their licen

[Creepy Crawler]

They sure do.

Have any CS guys doing work for a company ACTUALLY have every license fly by their legal department? I wonder what the cost of Windows(pick your flavor) license has(compliance too), aside the cost of the actual right to use it per 1 machine?

And, now what's the cost of any GPL or GPL-like license has on a company?

GPL and BSD Good for Companies

[alucinor]

If a company is going to open source some code, why would they choose a BSD-style license? Well, that'd be if they're actually selling the code they're open sourcing.

But another aspect of open source is to have a pool of shared code, usually infrastructure-type stuff -- this is what the GPL is good for. In this case, a company's main product isn't this code -- this code just helps prop up their main product. Here is where the GPL shines in business: it enforces a "neutral zone" between companies, so that all infrastructural changes be open to everyone and uncooptable.

Ironically, the rise of this common infrastructure (mostly in the form of GNU/Linux and its related operating system software) probably wouldn't have happened had it not been for Microsoft. As they have spread and assimilated company after company, taking advantage of the real need for integation in the computer world, the only real way for the rest of the industry to stay competitive with them has been to pool resources.

The GPL just protects that treaty. But like I said, I suspect that it will only remain neccessary if either the GPL pool becomes a Microsoft-like force unto itself, or else Microsoft itself stays strong enough to require the GPL pool to counterbalance it.

Stupidity

[Brandybuck]

I don't know what's worse, the fact that a vice president of HP can be so stupid, or the fact that he got applauded for his stupidity. The former doesn't know what Free Software but insists on making a speech about it, and the latter are willing to applaud any praise of the GPL no matter how erroneous that praise might be.

It's one thing to want to limit the number of approved Open Source licenses. I may disagree with it, but I understand the motive. I can also understand his urging his competitors to use the more popular Open Source licenses instead of their own (even though HP still insists on proprietary for most of its software).

But when he says that the GPL is not copyrighted, he is being stupid. EVERY Free Software and Open Source license is copyrighted! Even the sacred and immaculately conceived GPL! For a LWCE keynote speaker to make such a fundamental blunder on the nature of Free Software is scandalous.

Too many companies make up their own OSS licenses.

[TorKlingberg]

He has a good point. It seems like every big company going into OSS make up their own license for no particular reason. Incompatible with every other OSS license out there of course.

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[drew]

I don't get this one though. I write open source software so people can use it. "leaching" is what they're doing by nature.

This depends on the perspective of the developer though. An individual developer who just wants his code to be out there for anyone to use may not have any issue with a company selling a product based on his code, but a company like IBM, who sells a lot of products and services around open source code that they have released, probably doesn't want HP, Sun, et al. making and selling closed source improved versions of their products. In that case, GPL makes more sense than BSD to the developer (IBM) because it ensures that any improvements that are made to the code by other companies are also available to IBM to be incorporated back into their own version.

Sun hated by FOSS?

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

Sun really has contributed some significant things to FOSS. OpenOffice is hugely important, for example. And not as code per se, but as standards, things like NFS are wonderful.

Probably much of the problem comes from the erratic behavior of Sun itself. Johnathan Schwartz in particular has, on alternating weeks, either sucked up to the FOSS community or belligerently insulted FOSS. And their patent issues are still looming, and not at all FOSS friendly, e.g.:

    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200502021 40308780

Plus the whole matter of Sun being one of the major semi-backdoor funder of the SCO lawsuits really hasn't won them any love among FOSS users. A few million dollars spent on trying to kill Linux through deception and spurious lawsuits doesn't spread the love.

Re:Sun hated by FOSS?

[jiushao]

The two-faced practice is annoying. No way around that. At least the actions mostly stick to the positive end of the spectrum.

Not granting patents to non-CDDL code is a somewhat spurious practice too. On the other hand IBM has not pledged their patent base surrounding AIX to the GPL community (or any OSS community) either, and seems to be quite popular nonetheless (a bit of a strawman to bring up the point that Solaris is open sourced and not AIX again I admit). It does at any rate seem that Sun has gone to far greater lengths here than pretty much any other company (check out Slashdot darling Apple).

The fact that Sun bought the full SystemV rights around that time to hurt Linux on the other hand I consider to be a Slashdot conspiracy theory. SCO started out by suing IBM, Sun went out and promised their customers complete safety and bought out the full license. A very reasonable move to keep their customers calm. In addition they needed the full license for another reason entirely anyway; To open-source Solaris. So it all fits together nicely.

Re:Sun hated by FOSS?

[njcoder]

According to McNealy, Sun mostly paid for x86 unix drivers. You want to talk about an SCO connection how about how HP was the major contributor to SCO's bus tour.

Learn how to use Google

[Anonymous Coward]

And then find http://opensource.hp.com/

Who is HP in the OSS world?

[justins]

Okay, companies which have released as much OSS software as IBM and Sun should listen to HP because... why?

I'm sure the Eclipse people and the OpenSolaris project, among many others, have been waiting with great anxiety for HP's opinion of what they are doing. "Hey guys, stop everything! Martin Fink says we're using the wrong license!"

Even if the guy has a point, it takes some gall for HP to tell these other companies much of anything about how to conduct their OSS business.

HP's Open Source Contributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Many HP employees are members of the Debian development community.
- Paul Bame, Dann Frazier, Bdale Garbee, Eric Schwartz, Al Stone, Matt Taggart, and Matthew Wilcox among others are "Debian Developers"
- HP hosts several iimportant servers for the Debian project, including gluck.debian.org, a full primary mirror (85GB); merkel.debian.org and merulo.debian.org, ia64 development systems; and paer.debian.org, a hppa development system.
- HP has donated additional systems to the Debian project that are used for infrastructure and pporting efforts
- HP uses Debian as its internal development platform
- HP Linux Inkjet Driver project

and many more http://opensource.hp.com/opensource_projects.html.

huh???

[mkcmkc]

Have you even read the licenses?

If (say) Sun releases their code under a BSD license, they clearly give up more control than if they release it under the GPL.

Mike

Well then...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

By people not willing to work on code which can be closed up and made propriatery and people denied free access to it by its next best distributor.

Hmmm, wel this explaines the problems getting people interested in Apache. Ah, if only the Apach folks would GPL their project, it might actuallt "take off"...

And what do they offer in the form of GPL stuff?

[OS24Ever]

Disclaimer: I work for IBM in the hardware side, so I am biased. IMHO the best thing HP did was buy Compaq and destroy a worthy competitor. This is not a troll, and not flaimbait for folks with moderator points that are discussion adverse. To comply with IBM rules for identifying myself I also need to point out the following comment is my own personal opinion and isn't sanctioned/dictated by IBM

To me, at rough glance, this is typical HP tactics. Instead of touting what they're doing, they point the finger at everyone else and go 'see, they suck so we're OK' but don't tell you why they're OK.

The hard part about the GPL (from the way I understand it, which could be flawed) is you in effect give up any IP claims you have on something when it's submitted if you should choose to change the way you do things later. I think what you're seeing by a lot of companies that are opening the kimono a bit but in case this turns out to be a wild fad or something they can close it back up should they want too.

Personally I think the genie is out of the bottle and it is only a matter of time. But monster companies by nature are conservative, and won't jump whole heartedly into something right away.

HP/Compaq is in bed with the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

Hoping to destroy open source from within and has an unusual partnership. Often a mouthpiece for Microsoft.

I've steer many away from compaq/hp and I'd recommend you all do the same.

But what do you expect, their Canadian, eh?

Re:HP/Compaq is in bed with the devil

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Nortel --> HP/Compaq
                          --> ATI

In one swift stroke, killing off Nortel kills the next two. There's little choice in buying their products unless there's a collective squeeze.

Psychological fingerprints.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for mod points when you need them.

If you don't like the GPL, don't use the code...

Did he just say?....

[X]

...that the GPL isn't an open source license?

General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom... In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted.

Let's see all the ways that that sentence is poorly worded:

1. Whether the licenses themselves are copyrighted isn't what he's talking about, but whether the licensed code is copyrighted.
2. For the GPL to work, the GPL'd code has to be copyrighted.
3. The difference between "free software" and "open source software" has nothing to do with licenses or legalese, but rather the rational behind said licenses.
4. The really big one: The GPL is an open source license!!

Now, you might blame try to blame the writer for some of the mistakes here, but the real crime was committed by the editor. That's just pathetic.

Do you know what "demagoguery" means?

[ievans]

It is true that the older systems like HP-UX, Tru64 and VMS aren't GPL'ed, but as I said in another post, it's probably very difficult to do so without either heavy recoding or relicensing of other codebases.

...and that's why Sun came up with and is using the CDDL, as it can be applied per file to avoid having to rewrite or relicense every bit of code that Sun doesn't have full rights to. Plus some stuff about patents.

This whole thing is pure theater, like politicians wearing short-sleeved shirts and baseball caps. Not that IBM and Sun are above these tactics as well....

Why?

[thedarkstorm]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see NonStop or True64 or HP/UX under a GPL license?

more VMS less talk

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey HP!

How about open sourcing OpenVMS ?

An amusing HP request

[Anonymous Coward]

Since a big chunk of IBM and Sun's revenue comes from software, that's an amusing request from a competitor in the hardware market. What is HP offering to "GPL" on its end that is comparable to what they are asking Sun or IBM to GPL?

I wonder if Nabisco will GPL oreos.

[OT] Re:Jesus...

[torpor]

No we won't!

Not the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a proliferation of licenses is messy, but the GPL is the wrong license for HP to be advocating. It's the longest "open source" license you ever read, and it sure doesn't make software anything like free! Gawd, look at all the restrictions, caveats, obligations, mechanations, incriminations, and who-knows-what-all else are in there! I like the license that's used by ZLib. Short, simple, to the point, developer-friendly, and you don't need a lawyer (I understand that the FSF retains one full time) to figure it out. We all know that Stallman was bitter and spiteful about other developers possibly making a living or heaven forbid doing slightly better than that using his work.... It's time for people to grow up and get past that childish attitude. This is science. It's a public resource. Share it freely and don't resort to this petty GPL stuff.

Is he auditioning to be the new McNealy?

[sirwired]

Offering to ship IBM a new HP laptop with Linux installed? Har-dee-freaking-har...

I guess he also forgot that IBM has absolutely no trouble making cool-running, low-power processors (see Blue Gene). The trouble is that Apple can't seem to get anybody to buy their systems, making it not worth IBM's trouble.

I have no doubt that IBM does not use the GPL for perfectly good reasons. Perhaps they have found some holes in the license, or something along those lines. In any case, IBM has been shoving Free software out the door at a decent clip. Maybe HP would have room to talk when they have an equivalent volume of free software that they have released.

If HP really wants credibility in the corporate marketplace for this stuff as something other than a commodity Linux server supplier, they need to put their money where their mouth is and do some serious investment in open-source software.

Actual customers REALLY see through the cheap shots at competitors, as it is usually a sign that you are all talk and no action. (i.e. Sun for the last few years. Look where all their tough talk has gotten them.)

They can ask Sun to release Solaris under the GPL after they have done the same for HP-UX. Until then, STFU.

SirWired

P.S. For those that suggest the BSD license as an appropriate source license for commercial software vendors. Not a chance. If a big company is going to give away its code for free (already a profit risk), it is certainly not going to let somebody else turn around and charge for it.

Because not everyone wants the GPL

[typical]

The GPL gives the FSF relicensing control over your code -- they can produce new revisions of the GPL.

Now, I use the GPL on almost all the hobbyist work I do, but you'd have to be pretty dumb not to consider this if you're IBM and considering sticking decades of IP under the thing. You're handing control of your primary asset over to another organization -- specifically, one that's more than a little bit radical.

Personally, I understand the concerns with compatibility with the GPL -- fewer licenses == good from an engineering standpoint. I do think that we *could* have far fewer licenses. I think that the requirements of Sun/IBM/what-have-you are probably pretty similar and could be met by a similar license. There are major benefits to having a small number of licenses and well-understood and documented interactions between them -- people have enough trouble understanding the GPL and LGPL alone. But there are significant issues that people can raise the the GPL, and it's silly to assume that the GPL is one-size-fits-all. (Heck, the GPL itself has fragmented into a number of variants even among FSF adherents, such as Linus's GPL-v2-only, the Guile license, the LGPL, and so forth.)

Freshmeat agrees that the GPL is the most popular

[ninejaguar]

...the General Public License, the most popular license for free software that gives users the freedom run the program for any purpose.

Apparently, most people realize that following the Golden Rule is a good thing.

= 9J =

Re:s/LGPL/BSD/

[micheas]

One reason some developers dislike the BSD license is the story (you can find several examples if you feel like looking) of someone releasing a program under a BSD style license, someone else releasing a modified binary with no source and the original developer getting support requests that he/she cannot help with.

The GPL also has this to a lesser degree, which results in things like QMail, which has a license that says you cannot distribute binaries that are not compiled from pristine sources.

BSD is about freedom for the developer, GPL is about freedom for the end user (No vendor lock in).

Your preference is probably a matter of which you spend more time doing. Integrating software to perform a task (typical busines), or writing software to do a task (typical software business).

The GPL is a remarkably effective, though imperfect, solution to bad behavior.

The FSF *cannot* relicense your work

[JavaRob]

The GPL gives the FSF relicensing control over your code -- they can produce new revisions of the GPL. [...] You're handing control of your primary asset over to another organization -- specifically, one that's more than a little bit radical.

Not true. Your software is only subject to future versions if you license it under GPL version X "and any later version". You don't have to do that. In the text of the GPL it mentions that the program may specify a single version number, vs. a version number "or any later version", vs. just "GPL" (in which case all versions apply). It's totally under your control, and you aren't fragmenting the GPL itself in any way when you specify which version applies to your software.

Remember, *you* still own the copyright (unless you specifically grant this to the FSF for legal purposes). No matter what the FSF does, your code will still be licensed only as you say it is. You can even choose to stop distributing the GPL'ed version (though other people still can, with that version of the code), and release new versions under a totally commercial license (or release GPL and commercial simultaeously!), as long as you own copyright for the entire work. If you accept contributions, the respective authors control distribution of their portion -- which is licensed to YOU as GPL-only unless you arrange something else.

I'll definitely agree that the GPL is not right for every project -- like any license, you have to decide if value exchange is worth it, and I don't know the current IBM/Sun licenses in detail -- but the reasons you mentioned are not real.

[apologies if this post comes off as too prickly... I gotta get some sleep]

apache 2.0 explicitly adds patent indemnity

[steve_l]

All apache2.0 adds is patent lawsuit indemnity "sue a project about a patent, you cannot that app yourself" , and takes away the "you need to credit apache".

I dont see this as non-free; it was designed to be GPL-compatible.

Re:apache 2.0 explicitly adds patent indemnity

[LurkerXXX]

You don't see it as non-free. Others do.

"Their new license contains more stuff, and we do not accept MORE STUFF in licenses." - Theo

The basics of the BSD license are pretty much, if you use this, you must include the copyright. That's it. Otherwise it's totally free to use. No 'take-aways'. You might think adding that particular restriction is fair. Others might think other restritions are also fair. If you start adding them all in, your license starts becoming more and more restrictive. The basis of the BSD license is that there are NO restrictions other then the inclusion of the copyright. The software is *totally* free. The OpenBSD folks want to make sure that their OS stays totally free and doesn't get weighed down in 'just one more tiny *fair* restriction' plus 'just one more tiny *fair* restriction' plust 'just one more tiny *fair* restriction', ad infinitum. The copyright notice is it. No more stuff.

Re:apache 2.0 explicitly adds patent indemnity

[steve_l]

the thing is, GPL already has a "sue someone over the software and your rights go away clause". The apache #2 license just explicitly says "and that includes patent infrigements", and also takes away the need for the credits in the docs.

I understand why you dont need a plethora of licenses, and think that there are far too many OSS licenses out there, that together blur the distinction between closed-source and open-source, as they remove the gap between shared-source things (MS, vmware) and corporate-open-source (sun stuff). I just think that patents are a potential troublespot. Is the ASF license a step in the right direction? I dont know -I do think unity across the main product lines (apache, GNU, BSD) would be good.

Re:apache 2.0 explicitly adds patent indemnity

[LurkerXXX]

the thing is, GPL already has a "sue someone over the software and your rights go away clause

That's the GPL license. We are talking about the BSD license here (OpenBSD *isn't* GPL). There is no such restriction in the BSD license. If you think patents are a trouble spot, I'm sure your happy with the GPL license. But patent-exceptions aren't part if the BSD license, and people who like the BSD license aren't going to add them into it. I'm not going to sacrifice my *free* license just to be unified with a less-free GNU license. Sorry.

Mod this guy up, please

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much Insightful

Silly GPL / BSD discussion

[Steeltoe]

*sigh* here we go again..

GPL is designed to protect the freedom of the *code*. Ie. when I release a GPL-licensed work I want to retain the *users* freedom to access the code, and not become a second-grade citizen of the work. GPL does NOT restrict use, and only restricts distribution IF you make changes AND distribute your binaries. This is a must in order to protect said freedom of the *code*.

BSD is designed to protect the freedom of *individuals*, wether they want to hide their changes or not. It does not protect the freedom of the users of the software to make changes, since binaries can be distributed without source and copyright law will prevent any tinkering of the binaries. However, it does grant more freedom in making other people second-grade citizens through copyright law. Ie. you need to ask Microsoft to change or distribute the BSD-stack in the NT-kernel. Thus BSD is more commercial-friendly than the GPL, since for now, corporations thrive by sucking away the freedom of their users and rely on their ignorance.

It all amounts to:
The right tool for the right job. None of the alternatives is morally superior. It is a matter of PERSONAL and POLITICAL preference.

If you wish to discuss POLITICS, discuss politics. But to discuss GPL vs. BSD, you're missing the point. What you need to discuss is wether corporations should be doing what they are doing now, or wether we need a change in how corporations work.

It is good to learn to discuss the root, not the leaves on the tree. The leaves always changes, while the root remains and you don't get to the core.

And the core is always spiritual. ;-)

Re:Silly GPL / BSD discussion

[tcopeland]

Very interesting, I hadn't seen that distinction before, thanks!