PathScale Gives FreeBSD, NetBSD A New C++ Runtime

[dnebdal]

Funny how BSD people get pissed when people use their code according to the rules of their own license. They don't even know what the heck it is they actually want.

Can you find an example of that? They're typically not bothered by their code used with the original license in something else.

[RealNC]

Funny how BSD people get pissed when people use their code according to the rules of their own license. They don't even know what the heck it is they actually want.

[dnebdal]

From the Free Software Foundation's licence recommendations:

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

On the other hand:

FreeBSD license

This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed. (It is also sometimes called the “2-clause BSD license”.) It is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the FreeBSD license is a reasonable choice. However, please don't call it a “BSD” or “BSD-style” license, because that is likely to cause confusion which could lead to use of the flawed original BSD license.

(Just for clarity, the old BSD license had an advertising clause - any ads for a product using code with that license had to include a sentence about "includes software written by x". It wasn't GPL compatible, since it was an additional restriction ... and it was somewhat annoying if you had to add a stack of those sentences to every ad.)

And yes, that FSF recommendation makes sense - the only part where people get angry over BSD/GPL interactions is when someone goes against that.

[Ex-Cyber]

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

The FSF considers software patents to be a major threat to freedom, so it makes sense that they would not specifically recommend a license that doesn't do anything to address patent issues.

[archibald]

From the Free Software Foundation's licence recommendations:

When you contribute to an existing project, you should usually release your modified versions under the same license as the original work. It's good to cooperate with the project's maintainers, and using a different license for your modifications often makes that cooperation very difficult. You should only do that when there is a strong reason to justify it.

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

[dnebdal]

At first I didn't explain very well what I meant. XorEaxEax did. I meant they prefer supporting closed source projects rather than GPL ones.

Mmh, that does make more sense.
I wouldn't say that they "prefer supporting" it, it's more that a closed project is ... ignorable? It doesn't really bother them, because the only things that will happen are on a scale from "never hear about it again" to "get patches from that company". Compare that to someone making the code GPL, which means that they can see, but not use, everything the other part does to it: When you also know that making it GPL is completely unnecessary, it almost seems like taunting them. Besides, they're probably less likely to get patches from a GPLed fork, since the people involved in that will probably think "oh, it's already open".

So, yeh ... from a BSD point of view, a closed program using some of their code is probably preferable to a GPL project making it GPL-licensed. (Again, this is different from a GPL-ed project using it under the original BSD license, which is a good thing.)

[kraftman]

I didn't miss it - but it's still a ridiculous assertion. Your post effectively said "they prefer closed to open-source programs, and they show it by writing open-source programs with a specific license". Which is not among the more convincing arguments I've heard. (As has been discussed between that post and this reply, admittedly.)

At first I didn't explain very well what I meant. XorEaxEax did. I meant they prefer supporting closed source projects rather than GPL ones.

[dnebdal]

Yes. It seems you missed what some other people said before.

I didn't miss it - but it's still a ridiculous assertion. Your post effectively said "they prefer closed to open-source programs, and they show it by writing open-source programs with a specific license". Which is not among the more convincing arguments I've heard. (As has been discussed between that post and this reply, admittedly.)

@archibald:
BSD code used in a GPL project, but kept BSD: Happiness. Unicorns dancing under rainbows etc.
BSD code used in closed-source project: Eh, if I have to use it at some point maybe it'll be slightly better than it'd have been otherwise.
BSD code made GPL: Why? They could have used it anyway, so making it impossible to import their changes is just insulting.

On a side note, the companies using FreeBSD are fairly decent at contributing back - after all, it's less work if a change is added upstream.

[archibald]

If they preferred closed source they wouldn't be writing open source. The only thing I don't understand is how some BSD advocates can prefer closed source over GPL (unless that is what you meant), from a practical standpoint closed source is worse for BSD than GPL licenced code so I can only assume such preference is about licence politics/zelotry, not practicality.

I don't know that they prefer it, I think it might just irritate them less. Whilst closed source software does say "NO! NO Mr. BSD, NO! You may NOT use this code unless you (as the original author) change your licence to the one I prefer!", it doesn't follow it with "Look at me! I'm free, you have complete freedom with my code!".

A caricature certainly, but the from the BSD dev's perspective you've got somebody who took your code and added extra conditions to it (so far, so similar to a closed source project) but then touts their code as being free when it's perfectly un-free from where Mr. BSD is sitting.

I'm still not sure why GPL is better in practice than closed source - the devs don't want to reverse engineer it, and if they did RE, how many people would believe that they didn't peek at the source code if they got stuck? How do you think the Linux devs would react to the BSD devs saying "we RE'd the linux kernel and now we have these new features!". I suspect that the lawyers would get involved and nobody wants that.

I should note that this is spectulation, I don't speak for all of them etc. etc.

[kraftman]

If they preferred closed source they wouldn't be writing open source. The only thing I don't understand is how some BSD advocates can prefer closed source over GPL (unless that is what you meant), from a practical standpoint closed source is worse for BSD than GPL licenced code so I can only assume such preference is about licence politics/zelotry, not practicality.

Yeah, you explained this very well. Maybe their problem is when bsd code is included into some proprietary project it's not so visible. When it's included into GPL project they can only look at the code, but they can forget about having it back.