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Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation
Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. While I sincerely doubt they'll release Vista under a GPL license anytime soon, this is certainly an unexpected series of moves on their part, and could possibly lead to more OSS (as opposed to 'Shared Source') interactivity between what is arguably Linux' greatest adversary and the Open Source community." (We mentioned the announced support for the Apache Foundation earlier today, as well.)
If it's LGPL, they can "extend" as much as they want and people can fork whenever they think MS has gone too far.
Actually, they didn't do that, either. A rollover of a particular long cycle in the Long Count calendar occurs then, and its one that has correspondence to an end of a previous creation recorded in their myth (the last 5 numbers of the date are the same, and only those last 5 numbers are recorded, which was apparently fairly common practice), from which various New Age folks invented the idea that Maya Calendar prediced the end of the world on December 21, 2012. There are, in fact, specific predictions made in some Maya writings of predicted future events clearly within this creation on dates in the Long Count that would post-date December 21, 2012, so its pretty clear that if such a belief in the end of the creation on 12.19.19.17.19 existed (for which there is, AFAIK, not one bit of evidence), it certainly wasn't universal.
As far as I can tell the difference between the GPL and BSD licenses is basically the difference between a project, and a piece of code.
Under BSD, they put out a project, it's open, and you can take bits and build it into something of your own, at which point it is your project, do what you like with it
With GPL the person who wrote the code wants all of their code to remain 'open' wherever it goes, so if you swipe some of their coding and put it in your own module, to make that module proprietary would be locking up their code. Although of course, the original source remains open...
Still, it makes the Extend (or maybe the Extinguish) part of the "3 E's" strategy harder if you have to give back everything you add.