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Interesting quote
Interesting quote
Posted Sep 16, 2006 19:48 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285)In reply to: Interesting quote by man_ls
Parent article: Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot (O'ReillyNet)
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.
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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.