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Linus on Linux, 20 Years In
Radium_ writes "Along with the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Linux kernel, Linuxfr — a French-language Linux website — published an interview with Linus Torvalds. [Interview in English.] The creator of Linux answers questions about Linux kernel licensing, his contributions to the kernel development model and Linux in 2031."
BSD license is more free, but does not preserve the freedoms.
Choice of license should depend on your goals. If one of them is philosophy, so be it. If one of them is business, so be it. I always pick the license that I feel best for a project.
To all the people who contributed Open Source projects over the last 20 years, a big THANKS. Can you imagine this landscape without open source software and alternatives to run it on like Linux and the *BSD variants?
Most of the internet would would need downtime for reboot every night, and the cost incurred by your ISP for all the proprietary licensing would probably put the net out of reach for most common folks.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Yes. The description "bunch of masturbating monkeys" was meant in the nicest possible way. :)
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
BSD license is more free, but does not preserve the freedoms.
Choice of license should depend on your goals. If one of them is philosophy, so be it. If one of them is business, so be it. I always pick the license that I feel best for a project.
It is more free but it does not preserve the freedoms? Who's freedoms? Stop it with the doublespeak/orwellian newspeak. Neither the BSD or GPL have anything to do with the end user. The end user does not give a rats arse about the source code, it's availability or what license it is under. The only people interested are third parties looking for an opportunity to contribute to the codebase and both licenses offer that freedom to those "developers". The BSD also offers the freedom to take that source, use it and incorporate it into a larger closed source product which implements the same standard as the original project.
if you want to push a particular ideology represented by the GNU foundation then you would choose the GPL but if you are interested in pushing forward an open standard that can be implemented and integrated by anyone then you would choose the BSD. Part of the reason why TCP/IP became the standard for the internet is because the stack was release under the BSD license which meant that closed source software vendors could implement the same stack on their platform quickly without fear of viral licenses or contamination.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
English is the result of Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and is no more legitimate than any of the other results.
— H. Beam Piper
I drank what? -- Socrates
Not at all.
Just watch a Mad Max movie.
The BSD is fine if you want some robber baron to exploit your work and lock you out of the end result. Otherwise, the GPL makes more sense. Despite of all of the noise from the BSD trolls, RMS did not create the GPL out of some deep seated need to overthrow capitalism. He created it because he started out with a more naieve approach to licensing and then had to deal with angry contributors when that first Robber Baron wannabe came along.
The GPL was created to keep CONTRIBUTORS happy. It was created so that the guys doing the actual work, the coders, would not get upset when the next Apple or Microsoft came along.
Guys like Linux have to deal with guys like Alan Cox.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't understand this.
BSD license is more free, but does not preserve the freedoms.
If somebody builds on your work and doesn't release it back to you, you don't lose anything. Effectively, there's no difference between that and if they had never even touched your stuff... which they wont do if they didn't want to have to share their changes with a GPL project anyway.
So you're only retaining contributors that are OK with sharing anyway and you're excluding people who do not want to give their modifications away openly and for $free. My idea of freedom is not "here is a free widget, but you can't improve and sell it, you can only give it away" - WTF?
This is strong-arming people into open source, just like the unnecessary association of $free with open. This isn't preservation, protection, nothing like that, it is attempting to SPREAD an ideal that has lately been starting to freak me out, and is counter intuitive to a healthy economy. There simply is no market demand for these ideals. GNU and FSF resort to this asshattery to attack a (once healthy) software market, forcing reimbursement for software development into areas that are unfeasible for small software businesses all for the sake of ideals that have zeeeeeeero demand in the marketplace. "Look at me, you can get a quick start on your project, for FREEE, there's just this uh, one string attached... you must support my agenda, mwahahahah! (evil Bowser laugh)"
Look, nobody uses Ubuntu because it has source code available. They use it because it's $free. I know everyone here knows this... "well duh, it has to be $free or nobody would use it and open source wouldn't advance"
Why doesn't creep out more people?
You keep saying that word - freedom - but it does not mean what you think it means.
The GPL is about asserting control over derivative works. It provides the illusion of freedom, but the source code is not actually free. If it was free, there wouldn't be any restrictions at all.
To say "the GPL protects the freedom of the source code" also implies that if a commercial entity made a derivative work, somehow the original source code is no longer free. That is complete bullshit. The only purpose the GPL has is to control derivative works.
If you want to use the GPL because it works for you, that's fine, go right ahead. But don't fool yourself into thinking that it has anything to do with freedom.
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Look, nobody uses Ubuntu because it has source code available. They use it because it's $free.
Yes, but many, many more people use FreeBSD and its siblings, partially because of the extra freedom of the BSD license, but mainly because so many contributors prefer the BSD license and its freedoms, and this has allowed the BSDs to progress and improve far, far more rapidly than Ubuntu or the other Linux distros. Because of this, Linux is on the verge of dying out completely.
The BSD is fine if you want some robber baron to exploit your work and lock you out of the end result.
What "work"? How do you "exploit" it? It's just bits. We all know that copying bits around is not wrong - after all, it's what TPB is all about, and we know they aren't wrong.
In all seriousness, if you feel the urge to correct anyone who calls copyright infringement "stealing", then you probably shouldn't call people who take BSD code and use it in closed-source programs "robber barons". It's about the same level of wrong.