Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. & Microsoft coming to Linux

[Mike Parker]

Yigal Chripun wrote:


> 
> How many companies do you know that use the BSD for their products?
> BSD is used by universities and non-profit organizations not companies.
> claiming that BSD > GPL in a corporate environment is simply wrong.

That's not the point. Plenty of companies use open source libraries in 
their code, even if they don't open source the end product. BSD is 
friendlier to them because they aren't forced to open up everything that 
touches it. GPL is viral. Use one GPL library and your whole project is 
tainted. Philosophically, GPL gives freedom to the end user. BSD leaves 
freedom with the developer. IMO, the latter is where it should be, as it 
is the developer who expends the resources to create the product in the 
first place.