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

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Georg Wrede (georg.wrede at iki.fi)'s article
> Seems BSD should be Our Way:
> [...] has a downside, the downside is that people, especially lawyers,
> especially corporate bosses look at the GPL and experience fear. Fear
> that all of their corporate secrets, business knowledge, and special
> sauce will suddenly be everted to the outside world by some inadvertent
> slip by some internal code. I think that fear is now costing us more
> than the threat[...]
> http://osnews.com/story/21192/ESR_GPL_No_Longer_Needed
> ........................
> Unrelated to this, but interesting, too:
> Microsoft Server/Tools boss Muglia said that "at some point, almost all
> our product(s) will have open source in (them)." He went on to say that
> "if MySQL (or) Linux do a better job for you, of course you should use
> those products."
> Well I'll be darned. I thought they'd get that like 5 years from now.
> (Hmm, maybe everybody should stick to the GPL, after all...)
> http://osnews.com/story/21053/Muglia_Open_Source_To_Permeate_Microsoft

Been thinking about this, and I think one of the things that the GPL really does
help with, for all its flaws, is resisting embrace, extend, extinguish tactics.
I'm not sure how practical it would be to make a license like the following stand
up in court and be unambiguous, but here's a very informal plain English version
of a license that I think would in principle be a good compromise between
permissive and copyleft:

Anyone receiving this code may modify, redistribute it, etc. in both binary and
source form without any except those mentioned below.

All warranties are disclaimed.

If you redistribute modified versions of this code in proprietary/closed source
form, you must specify any information necessary to allow other similar software
to interoperate with your product.  This includes file formats, network protocols,
etc.  You do not need to provide an implementation, only a reasonably
implementable specification.  Any modifications that do not affect
interoperability may be made and released with no strings attached.