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

Yigal Chripun yigal100 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 29 14:18:35 PDT 2009


On 29/03/2009 08:26, Mike Parker wrote:
> 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.

you contradict yourself. if a company uses open source libraries in 
their products than they are the *users* of the code, and the 
*developers* are those who *created* the library. what you meant to say 
is that many companies _exploit_ non free open source code (BSD and 
such) in their closed source products. You do all the hard work, give 
away your library for free, and those companies exploit that to enlarge 
their profit margins, after all they invested much less time/money in 
the product. if you really intended this outcome, you just robbed 
someone's job at that same company.

The GPL gives freedom to both the developers and the end-users while the 
BSD doesn't give any freedoms at all, to no one. That is why there are 
many successful companies that base their business model on free 
licenses like the GPL and zero companies that use the BSD. and that is 
the point.



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