> Because it would be legally difficult (because of all contributors have
> to agree upon relicensing)
As relicensing from BSD to GPL only places additional restrictions on the
licensee this can be done without approval from all contributors.
Of course the point remains that contributors happy with their project
being BSD-licensed will probably prefer rejecting your code to moving to
a (from their point of view) suboptimal license.
Posted Sep 15, 2008 16:25 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
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however, these same people apparently have no problem with their code being taken and put under a proprietary license.
if they don't like the code being put under a sub-optimal license they should pick a icense that prohibits it.
DRI, BSD, and Linux
Posted Oct 5, 2008 16:13 UTC (Sun) by sylware (guest, #35259)
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You are right. It's the hypocrite part of the BSD community... they hate GPL but love proprietary. BSD and GPL really define different open source development models. The BSD seems to push for sub-optimal open source version compared to proprietary forks(cf darwin/macos). I think that's what RMS saw a few decades ago and that's why he designed the GPL:to make the open source version THE optimal version of a software.
Nevertheless, some companies/people successfully work around the GPL protection against making sub-optimal open source version compared to proprietary forks:check out mysql/opensolaris/lzo... That RMS missed: how successful would be a license that's protecting code from its authors themselves?
Big buck company can easily buy all significant authors from Linux and make a optimal proprietary fork...
DRI, BSD, and Linux
Posted Nov 14, 2012 8:11 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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> It's the hypocrite part of the BSD community... they hate GPL but love proprietary
GPL is really proprietary... for the public. I guess that's why (some vocal people in...) the BSD community must feel better when only a few companies "steal" their code as opposed to the whole public: that's far less people and easier to pretend you don't know :-D