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Interesting quote
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 8:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)Parent article: Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
I'm surprised it was not highlighted by LWN:
Most of us had a very strong distaste for the so-called "virus" clause in the GPL, [...] In retrospect I think this was naive; if you look at the history, you'll see that neither CSRG nor the X Consortium were really successful in getting third parties to contribute back most of their changes [...].And this from one of the founders of NetBSD. You know, often it takes wit and guts to recognize your mistakes. I think this guy is both very clever and very brave; somebody from Red Hat or Novell should hire him and put him to good use.Linux has not been wholly successful in this either, and today there are myriad distributions which are subtly incompatible. However, they definitely did better.
If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.
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Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 19:06 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
That's a big deal in my eyes.
Now you can say: "One of the original founders of NetBSD said that if had a chance to do it all over again he would choose the lesser GPL over the BSD license".
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 19:48 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
What surprises me about this is the implicit admission that re-release of code was an implicit goal of all of these projects- I guess as a relative newcomer to the licensing game (~1997?) I assumed that all the old BSD-ish folks didn't give much of a damn about requiring/encouraging re-contribution of code, and hence that the freedom to take without giving back was a critical reason they chose to use BSD over GPL.
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 21:09 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
I'm even newer to free software (c. 2000), but I think sharing of modifications was an implicit goal all along. The argument went that you did not have to force people to share their modifications. Since it was so evident that a common codebase was better and forks were so obviously bad, common sense would eventually prevail: each one would share or perish. Apparently they did not think of the scenario where everyone could be so foolish and arrogant as to collectively kill the golden goose.It would be interesting to apply game theory to a code-sharing scenario and see how the GPL changes things.
For a modern version of hubris, look at Raymond's We don't need the GPL anymore interview (also by Biancuzzi).
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 21:24 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
(sigh) I was supposed to do a game theoretic analysis of the LGPL, GPL and BSD licenses as my senior thesis; unfortunately my advisor left the university and I couldn't find an appropriate replacement advisor. Yes, I'm still bitter.
He's wrong about the LGPL not existing
Posted Sep 16, 2006 20:55 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
The LGPL existed in 1992, before the first NetBSD release, so it was an option that the NetBSD people could have used. But RMS was never particularly comfortable with it and did not promote it the way he promoted the GPL; I think it was the Cygnus people who convinced him that the LGPL was necessary.