BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers

[brosis]

BSD code can't be GPL'ed either. It can be mixed with GPL code while retaining its original BSD license, in the same way that it can be mixed with proprietary code while retaining its original license.

You can't relicense BSD code any more than you can relicense GPL code (ie you need approval from the copyright holders).

You can.

Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

One takes BSD licensed software and strips this notice out, as a "modification".
A lot of proprietary software uses BSD code without BSD notice, instead having classic "$Name $Revision\n $Corporation (c) $Year. All rights reserved" header.
If source is released, only notice that is kept is

Portions, copyright regents of Berkley.

As simple as that.
The copy-paste is in place, there are no limits soever, except this one-liner. If they want, they can modify the portions slightly and remove the one-liner.

So why is the GNU website only calling the non-copyleft open source licenses permissive licenses, but not the copyleft licenses? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Where specifically?

Why does the GNU website differentiate between copyleft and permissive non-copyleft free software licenses, if all free software licenses are permissive?http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html

Because there are four categories of permissive licenses, sorted from most restricting to least restricting that is: permissive copyleft, permissive non-copyleft, all-permissive license and public domain.
Anything past permissive copyleft allows removing permissions, as such they are anarchic licenses (permission level: anarchy). Everything in public domain strips authorship as well.

Why can't we find one place on the whole site that the GPL is a permissive license?

Because you did not search. All GPL licenses are permissive licenses.
LGPL are one of the most permissive, since they allow everything except closing original source down.
The most permissive GPL is "All-permissive GPL license". It is more permissive than BSD.

Why does the Copyfree organization states that the Wikipedia definition is the http://copyfree.org/permissive/

I do not consider "copyfree" to be anything else than a collection of BSD trolls. The only "copyfree" is public domain.

[systemd rulez]

BTW, nowadays GPL and Linux is far more academic then BSD. When CS and software degree students go to classes on UNIX, they are taught using a distro of Linux instead. Also, a lot of research into inventing new security features and ways of computing are done using linux not bsd. University supercomputers use to do calculations use linux not bsd.

I met a recent graduate from a BSc. He did astronomy and I tolded me that for processing of astronomical images and data and astrophysical simulation, they use fedora and centos. He also said that when researchers release code for thier situations, they release it under the GPL not BSD.

You see, the GPL is far more academic then BSD. In fact today, Linux is leading the way in research of all fields while BSD is holding back technology and their are bigoted what it comes to anything new.

[systemd rulez]

or else get the facts once and forall: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensourc...k/kirkmck.html

I read this a long time ago, I find it rather one-sided and inaccurate.

[Sergio]

BSD fuckers always say that Linux is a copy of UNIX or that it's a plagerism of UNIX while thier OS is the real thing.

There's nothing further from the truth. Linux was written from scratch and it has code very different from unix but causes it to act like unix. BSD is a copy of unix, no innovation or whatsoever just blatent copying of code.

BSD deserved that lawsuit. I just wished it had completely distroyed BSD. Ban them completely from touching the code.

So TCP/IP, sockets, works in file systems (FFS), works in virtual memory, ARPANET were not innovations? I mean, kill yourself... or else get the facts once and forall: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensourc...k/kirkmck.html

[Sergio]

Nope.
The academic origins of whom? Both GPL and BSD are academic. Because RMS is MIT and BSD is Berkley.

If GPL is academic, what research project was it part of?
BSD was part of TCP/IP, virtual memory, file system, sockets, ARPANET... remember?
GNU/GPL was not part of a research project, hence no innovation, hence not academic.

The differences - three differences:
1) RMS' GNU is rewritten from scratch, where BSD is copypaste - for which they got sued by AT&T.
2) GPL is no less academic than BSD; but within GPL its impossible to develop something in open and then close it down leaving everyone behind (linking to proprietary is and was ok). That, unless two existing license exploits are present:
- GPL is not the only license or
- copyright assignment is required.
3) freedom protection aspect of GPL, which is completely absent in BSD - so BSD is Public Domain. You can go argue its not, but without protection of conditions (like in GPL) its clauses possess the legitimate power of a void.

1) You think you can just disrespect history saying BSD was copypaste? please do yourself a favor and read: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensourc...k/kirkmck.html
2) No, GPL is not academic, as pointed earlied. BSD, on the other hand, was. Also, I'm not an extremist when it comes to open/closed source; I think open-source is valuable, and personaly I had learned a lot from it, but I don't see closed-source as an enemy, as is usually seen by the GNU/GPL camp.
3) I don't find GPL's protection mechanism as freedom, nor BSD's abscense of them as anti-free.

No. Not proven. If its "academic", software for study, it does not mean anything.

Yes, it proves it and means a lot. It means that the main motivation for BSD has always been freedom, not support for companies. Put in another way: it is possible to get BSD code and close it, but that was never the purpose of BSD; as I said, BSD PREDATES all this. At most it can be seen as a side effect.

GPL is both for production and for study.
BSD is only for study, because it does not protect anything - its an advertizing license. Publishing any commercial content under advertizing license means making public domain. Nobody does that, except they have patent portfolio to cover it, or/and its about an interface to something bigger and they target large userbase by making the interface widely compatible.
For production for BSD, the license is EULA. EULA is extremely restricting, not much "freedom" left.

If this is the case, I see no problem with these; for me BSD represents freedom, but I also acknowledge the importance of GNU/GPL in the history of FOSS. I also give them their deserved merits.

If I am to choose between freedom license that only restricts removing that freedom, and freedom license that does not protect anything it claims and I end up with EULA in result, I choose GPL for freedom license.
Because BSD freedoms do not work since nobody cares about them, its anarchy.

You are free to think like that. Now, I see a simple, short license like BSD/MIT represent my ideals of freedom more than GPL, which is a license so complex that you can't think about doing something with them without the help of a lawyer. Something like this:

"The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called ?copycenter?, which is ?take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.?"
?Kirk McKusick, BSDCon 1999

Do not be surprised, if you loose GPL folks and will be dependent upon your new proprietary friends which hate freedom.
Not only you lie about freedom, you troll GPL and support the force behind anti-freedom proactively.
Do not wonder if GPL people will give a fuck about you.

I do not lie about freedom for stating what it means TO ME; you lie about it by stating what IT SHOULD MEAN TO EVERYBODY. I do not troll GPL; as said above, I give them their deserved credit.
I don't depend on "GPL people" so I would give a fuck if they give a fuck.

No.
GPL started because proprietary endangered the whole existence of UNIX and is sole purpose is to remove proprietary influence over the code it protects. Influence, not proprietary itself.
Proprietary is free to link runtime to GPL at any level and hence cooperate on binary level.
You can see that GNU/GPL is not anti-proprietary movement.

I think it is possible to have a free Unix even without GPL, although I must admit that the license has been a great strenght behind Linux' success. My point was that, while BSD was motivated by academy, by research, GNU/GPL on the other hand had more "emotional" motivations as a response for proprietary companies. This, I believe, invalids the claims that BSD supports closed-source companies.

Proprietary-agnostic = freedom-agnostic. BSD does not actually care about anything, it just advertizes 1)authorship 2)absence of warranty/responsibility

Well, I would say to this that I prefer a license that lets me decide WHAT is freedom (you could GPL the BSD) instead of a license that FORCES a definition of it (GPL is GPL now and forever). You can decide what freedom means to you, but trying to force everybody to think like this is, to me, something stupid.

Yes, BSD motivation was "do anything about our code what you want".
Its kind of putting fire out with gasoline.
The only one who fights freedom is the one who preserves it by limiting the single right remove freedom. That's RMS and co.

I'd love you to read http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensourc...k/kirkmck.html and tell me that the BSD folks weren't fighting for freedom if you dare.

For example, even if technology establishes under BSD license, no one can prevent major publisher from adding patented, closed
source extensions to it and thus invalidating the BSD-licensed technology altogether in one move.
A lot of serious flaws unpatched to consider this anything close to freedom, by the reactions of BSD folks upon GPLv3, those are not bugs, but features.

Perhaps the reaction to GPL3 can be seen extreme, but, have you really gone through that license? I give you again the case of Linus Torvalds: http://www.informationweek.com/softw...pocr/229215444
So, do you think that you, FSF, GNU, GPL or Richard Stallman really have the last word in this? You should stop thinking of yourselves as owners of the truth.

There is no such thing as "definition of freedom", there is freedom and there is anarchy. Freedom means "no slavery". Anarchy means allow everything.

I don't understand this statement; your are indeed defining freedom.
I think the term 'freedom' is one of the most controversial used throughout history, and neither of us are in the position to say what it is and what it isn't. The most we can do is say what represents closer our ideal of freedom

Anarchy is not freedom - its void. An absence of any policy. This state is never possible, it is similar to null pointer.

But remember that a null pointer is actually a pointer to address 0x0; it is fundamentally invariable from any other pointer.

Single entity within anarchy immediately postulates totalitarian monarchy(no anarchy). Two+ entities postulate either war (duocratie); or any agreement(which is not anarchy - because they postulate limits).
For anarchy to maintain, there should be zero entities or entities completely not acting in any way, because freedom to commit action of one entity will unavoidably cancel freedom of another entity.
That's not opinion, its not preference, that are facts.

You are already assuming a definition for freedom I do not agree with, hence I do not agree with your conclusions. (what if anarchy is the only true freedom?).

My preference is GPL when it comes to freedom or proprietary when it comes to keeping secrets; everything in-between is not stable enough.
What secrets can you trust, is different matter as trust is a weakness.

I prefer the simpleness of BSD for freedom; I do not, however, discard doing closed-source or GPL stuff.

Also, notice that not everyone agrees with Stallman and the GNU/GPL project; it is not a BSD-exclusive thing. For example, look at the way Linus Torvalds thinks: https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161
Torvalds is very critic with this whole issue: he likes GPL2, but does not agree with FSF, Stallman, GNU/GPL in all they say.

[bridgman]

Wrong, BSD licensed code can be re-licensed, and the copyright removed. It justs goes to show you how dumb BSD fuckers are.

Why do you think that ? All of the BSD license variants start with the following :

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
...

[Vim_User]

Permissive licenses include copyleft and public domain; and contrast to prohibitive licenses such as EULA.

So why is the GNU website only calling the non-copyleft open source licenses permissive licenses, but not the copyleft licenses? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Why does the GNU website differentiate between copyleft and permissive non-copyleft free software licenses, if all free software licenses are permissive?

In the GNU Project we usually recommend people use copyleft licenses like GNU GPL, rather than permissive non-copyleft free software licenses.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.html

Why can't we find one place on the whole site that the GPL is a permissive license?

Why does the Copyfree organization states that the Wikipedia definition is the

closest thing to a clear definition of the term "permissive license"

http://copyfree.org/permissive/

[systemd rulez]

1) RMS' GNU is rewritten from scratch, where BSD is copypaste - for which they got sued by AT&T.

BSD fuckers always say that Linux is a copy of UNIX or that it's a plagerism of UNIX while thier OS is the real thing.

There's nothing further from the truth. Linux was written from scratch and it has code very different from unix but causes it to act like unix. BSD is a copy of unix, no innovation or whatsoever just blatent copying of code.

BSD deserved that lawsuit. I just wished it had completely distroyed BSD. Ban them completely from touching the code.

[systemd rulez]

BSD code can't be GPL'ed either. It can be mixed with GPL code while retaining its original BSD license, in the same way that it can be mixed with proprietary code while retaining its original license.

You can't relicense BSD code any more than you can relicense GPL code (ie you need approval from the copyright holders).

Wrong, BSD licensed code can be re-licensed, and the copyright removed. It justs goes to show you how dumb BSD fuckers are. The thing is that what GPL people do it, they start crying, screaming like children (e.g. Theo de Raadt) while they just actively support proprietary companies when they take BSD code.

Might as well remove thier pants and bentover next to a sign saying "rape here for free"

[bridgman]

BSD code can't be GPL'ed either. It can be mixed with GPL code while retaining its original BSD license, in the same way that it can be mixed with proprietary code while retaining its original license.

You can't relicense BSD code any more than you can relicense GPL code (ie you need approval from the copyright holders).