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Only Idiots Don't Give Back To Free Software
Julie188 writes "Downstream projects who take without contributing back to the upstream project defeat the benefit of open source and sooner or later, all organizations developing on top of open source code will realize this, contends Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. So the time for cajoling those users — even commercial projects like Canonical — into participating is over. Contributing is 'not the right thing to do because of some moral issue or because we say you should do it. It's because you are an idiot if you don't,'" he says."
Update: 08/30 21:40 GMT by S : Reworded summary to clarify that Zemlin wasn't referring to end users.
The problem with bsd licensed code is that it quickly becomes fragmented proprietary code.
Like for instance, the bsd sockets implementation.
Microsoft made heavy use of this code to make the earliest version of their winsock api. A modification that is closed.
As far as I know, osx uses a bsd flavored sockets implementation as well. It is quite possibly the most widely used tcp\ip reference stack implementation anywhere.
The issue is that osx sockets, winsock, bsd sockets, et al are all fragmented, and with the exception of the parent bsd implementation, all closed and proprietary.
Had it been licensed under gpl, all the child implementations of the parent would be open, and advancements or improvements could cross proliferate.
That is the real strength of the gpl. The improvements you make to the code to make it useful to you could very well be improvements that others can use to make the code work for them. Instead of fragmenting the code, it helps to unify the code, and helps it to evolve with much less "reinventing the wheel."
The bsd license has its place, but it is no substitute for the gpl.
If it was GPL they would not have touched the code. So you wuld have not just have fragmented versions but entirely written from scratch versions.
I prefer BSD or Apache style licences. But I understand the goal of GPL. It just went to far. LGPL is a good level but it is so poorly defined that any company lawyer looks at it and they start pulling their hair out and shout NO.