BSD and GPL (was: All caps .TH page title)

Alejandro Colomar
2022-07-29T11:43:16Z

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Hi Ingo and Branden,

On 7/27/22 18:05, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> [...]
>> Under this umbrella, the Linux kernel is effectively under the BSD
>> license.
>
> Except that free software projects cannot copy from it - that's
> quite a big BUT since allowing *everybody* to copy the code for
> any purpose is the central idea of the BSD license. ;-)
>
> [...]
>> The BSD camp did ultimately win the copyleft argument after all.
>
> I'm not so sure about that. The idea of the BSD license is to
> allow all uses that can be licensed to others according to the Berne
> Convention, retaining only those rights - essentially the moral rights,
> like being known as the author, and abuse of the Works for slandering
> the author being prohibited - that are inalienable in the first place
> according to the Berne Convention.
>
> Even if in effect, the Copyleft aspect of the GPL is not usually
> enforced against Foundation members, GPL code is far from as free
> as the Berne Convention would permit it to be, and far from as free
> as if it were under a BSD license.
>
> So essentially, you say that in practice, the GPL fails to attain
> the goals RMS designed it for, and i say that all the same, it has
> some serious and (hopefully) unintended detrimental side effects.
>
> I can't say i'm too happy with that.
> I certainly don't regard it as a win.
> It looks more like a lose-lose situation to me.
>
> But i don't think we can do much about that. Groff is still
> usable for most users without too much pain. Unless i want to
> contribute significant amounts of code, even i could do so.
> And to be fair, even if i wanted to contribute large amounts of
> code, the GPL would *not* prevent me from doing that - the thing
> the would stop me is the FSF CLA, which is an entirely different
> beast.

Yes, essentially, the kernel is BSD-licensed to big corporations paying
to the FSF, but GPL to free software programmers.

BSDs are BSD for everyone.

I'm still using GPL for my own things, but I'm not happy at all with
this situation, and considered several times giving up and using BSD
licenses. I still don't, because I'm not accepting the lose-lose situation.

But at the same time, I'd like to make a note here that the intention
matters more than the license to me, and my intention is that my code
can be useful to other open-source programmers. So, if anyone needs to
use code of mine in other open-source code, don't be intimidated by the
license, and you can always ask me for an exception to the license. The
end goal is that open-source code improves.

Non-open-source is still strictly limited to GPL regarding my own code.
The paragraph above is not an invitation to break GPL in my code.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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