NetBSD Moves To a 2-Clause BSD License

jschauma writes "Alistair Crooks, president of the NetBSD Foundation, announced recently that it 'has changed its recommended license to be a 2-clause BSD license.' This makes NetBSD even more easily available to a number of organizations and individuals who may have been put off by the advertising or endorsement clauses. See Alistair's email and NetBSD's licensing information for more details."

Comments

Re:BSD is dying.

[BobNET]

Clear, irrefutable proof that BSD is dying.

I know, it seems like only nine years ago it was a four-clause license, now all three major BSDs have gone to two-clause licenses. Within a decade it'll be a zero-clause license and BSD will finally die...

"from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept." ??

[Anonymous Coward]

"from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept."

Um. The BSD clause is about as "neutered" as you can get.

Read up on what a copyleft is. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

In fact, if you still think the BSD is a "good license", read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html - and consider how many companies that work with BSD licensed software you evangelize today (Apple?) would *LOVE* it being the Bad Old Days of the '80s when a compiler was a $400 add-on product.

Re:"from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept." ??

[Chemisor]

> In fact, if you still think the BSD is a "good license", read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

Not everyone agrees with GNU's communist philosophy. Personally, I release all my open source code under the MIT license (which is what this new 2-clause BSD license really is), and would not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project. If you got out more, you might have met some people who disagree with you like I do.

Re:"from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept." ??

[rakslice]

Since the network-transparent design of X meant that, for years, everyone who had an X-capable workstation did run all the widgets in the server room, I'll just dispense with your question and ask the implied one: How do widgets sell servers?

Ease of use is part of it, at least for some people. But the real answer is that widgets sell workstations and desktops, and workstations and desktops along with poor interoperability between vendors sell servers.

In this era of free Windows file server software for Unix and bundled TCP/IP and free X for Windows, it's easy to forget what it was like in the not too distant past.

Re:"from the declaused-but-not-neutered dept." ??

[TheRaven64]

GCC had no Objective-C support. A company (NeXT) implemented Objective-C support on top of GCC and were (eventually) forced to release this code. They did, in a single 10K line C file, but didn't release the runtime library, making it useless on any platform other than NeXTSTEP. Later, the FSF wrote a replacement runtime library. They then added a load of #ifdefs to the 10K line file in GCC to make it compile Objective-C for their library.

NeXT (later Apple) didn't bother integrating these changes, and kept maintaining their fork of GCC and pulling changes in. No one outside Apple has worked on Objective-C in GCC for about a decade, and no one understands the code in GCC because it's absolutely hideous, which prevents new people getting involved.

Fast forward to the present. The third version of the GPL means that Apple are no longer working with the FSF at all - they are maintaining their fork of GCC and not pulling in any changes that are not explicitly dual-licensed. They are also working on a BSD licensed compiler framework, LLVM, and a new front end called clang (C language family). This can has more up-to-date Objective-C parsing than the FSF's branch of GCC, supporting a lot of Objective-C 2.0 features. The code generation is nicely abstracted from the AST, meaning it's easier to support different runtime libraries. Even though this is not GPL'd, and is developed primarily by Apple, it got code generation for the GNU runtime before code generation for the NeXT/Apple runtimes. It also got code generation for the newer Etoile runtime (which is also BSDL) before any support for Apple runtimes.

If NeXT hadn't been forced to contribute their changes back originally, GCC might not have had Objective-C support, or it might have had Objective-C support with cleaner layering (the code currently mangles parsing, semantic analysis and code generation into the same layer) - we will never know. The same is true of C++. Would MCC have released a closed front-end for a BSDL compiler? Probably, but this doesn't mean that GCC wouldn't have got a front end eventually. In fact, it would have been more likely to get a good one if it had been BSDL - things like X11 and TCP/IP show us that a BSDL (or MITL) reference implementation is more likely to become the core of an industry standard, since everyone can use it and not just people who like the GPL.

We'd also have had better IDEs, since the GPL and the fanatical devotion to preventing people reusing their code in proprietary projects is the reason that we don't see the GCC front ends used for syntax highlighting and refactoring tools now.

Re:BSD is dying.

[RiotingPacifist]

Funny how BSD is becoming less restrictive and GPL is becoming more so.

I realise that that is your point, but im allowed to steal it without giving credit now.