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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."
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...
BSD is not dying permanently, its just going through a rebirth cycle. Recently, it was reborn as a mac.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
It's not clear to me how GPL licensing creates free compilers but BSD licensing creates $400 compilers. If some company takes a $0, BSD-licensed compiler, changes two lines of code, and re-sells it under a non-BSD license with no improvements for $400, why would I pay them for it rather than use the $0 original?
If the reseller makes improvements, isn't it reasonable to be able to choose between the lesser, $0 version and the better, $400 version? And what's to stop me from reverse-engineering their improvements, applying those changes to the $0 BSD version, and releasing the updated version under a BSD license?
If you want to force your code to remain open-source, and/or don't want people to be able to integrate your code with non-open-source code, you're absolutely welcome to do so, and the GPL is a great choice. But let's not pretend that having a company re-publish your BSD code under another license somehow removes the utility, availability or openness of the original code.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One word: Motif. The mess caused by that is what finally convinced me that the GPL was a justifiable and justified option.
Motif probably set Unix development back by a decade, and was, I suspect, a not-inconsiderable factor in Microsoft's ability to penetrate the server room. And it was, at the time, a better option than the other choices (like OpenLook).
Of course, Motif was eventually both reverse-engineered (Lesstif) and engineered around (GTK/Qt), but it was a major obstacle and major headache for far longer than it should have been.
For whatever reasons, the (L)GPL seems to do far more to discourage forking than the BSD or MIT licenses. To anyone who remembers the Unix wars of the eighties, that's definitely a Good Thing(tm).
Actually, if you notice, OpenBSD already has a zero-clause license :)
I could have sworn it said "Aleister Crowley."
> 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.
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.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
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Any work that *BSD developers do to improve wireless support can be used in linux. The reverse is not true.
There are two reasons why BSD software will never be public domain. First, it's legally impractical to place something into the public domain. Everything is automatically copyrighted upon creation, but you need a lawyer to actually relinquish that copyright. Second, without a copyright you have nothing to hang a warrantly disclaimer on. The danger is not that someone can file off your name and pretend it is their own, but rather that they can distribute it without your disclaimer.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!