Software Freedom Law Center vs Theo de Raadt

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent public posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, Eben Moglen, lashed back at OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt without actually mentioning his name. 'What has happened is that people who do not have full possession of the facts and have no legal expertise — people whom from the very beginning we have been trying to help — have made irresponsible charges and threatened lawsuits, thus slowing down our efforts to help them.' Moglen pointed out that they have and continue to help all open source projects, including OpenBSD, but the process takes time. 'The required work has been made more arduous because some people have chosen not to cooperate in good faith. But we will complete the work as soon as we can, and we will follow the community's practice of complete publication, so everyone can see all the evidence.'"

Comments

Re:I don't understand BSD

[BitZtream]

Almost all of my code which is released under an open source license is done under a BSD license because the only thing I really want out of people using my code is recognition that I contributed in some part to the project.

If it becomes part of an open source project, under a GPL style license. Fine, thats fair, I'd hope they give back to me any fixes or enhancments, but if they don't thats okay because my name should still be in the source. This, in thoery means I'm better known in the development community and more likely to get a job working with people that appreciate my code.

Same goes for close source projects using my code, as long as they leave me credit, then some day in the future perhaps someone will say, 'hey, this guy did some good stuff, maybe we should see about hiring him?'

That is all I want out of the code I release. If I didn't care about that, I'd just call it public domain and forget about it. Occasionally I do release things as public domain when it seems far to trivial to reimplement in some other form.

To me, this is what open source is about, making it so other developers can benifit from the work I've done so maybe they build something better and everyone comes out ahead in the end.

What I don't want is for someone to have to reimplement something I've done just because my license doesn't comply with their license. To me there isn't a point in calling it 'open source' if someone can't use it in their project cause of some other silly licensing constraint or because they are trying to make money. I appreciate the BSD license style myself because I am employed as a commercial software developer. I can't use GPL'd code in any of my commercial products, so I many times have to implement something myself even though a GPL'd implementation exists.

As much as I want the world to all do things for the 'better good' of the world, its just unrealistic at this point in time to think that you're going to get quality software out of an entirely open source project unless it is run by some company or person who lays down some rules. I think too many people think GPL is the way to make all the software in the world free, but in my personal view, the really well done overall peices of software are written by someone motivated by financial concerns. In order to REALLY make money off software, open source just doesn't do it, you can always just get the source and build it yourself completely ignoring the original developers who invested their time to give you the software. On that same note, I don't think I've ever seen a dime from my source directly.

Sometimes I write code and open source it under a BSD license only to go to work the next day and pull that code into a closed source commercial product, so in that respect I suppose you could say it makes me some money, but mostly it just lets me do things in my own personal time that benifit me at work and don't require me to reimplement the whole thing if I want to use it in a personal project or at my next job. The company I work for loves it because they get all sorts of free work out of me on the weekends or after hours, I love it cause I don't have to implement stuff twice.

But ... with all that said, I have no idea why almost anyone else would write open source code that isn't under a more permissive license if they really want to 'help the community', GPL is more like a way to get people to fix your bugs :) There are plenty of big projects that have very permissive licenses that get contributions back from people even though they have no requirement to do so. Apache, zlib, libpng, openssl, all of them get plenty of stuff back, but don't REQUIRE you to make your project opensource if you use them.