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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...
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.
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).
> 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.