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Genetic metaphorGenetic metaphorPosted Oct 23, 2008 13:30 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547)In reply to: Genetic metaphor by rgmoore Parent article: LK2008: The values of the Linux community
I would describe the GPL as being dominant, while the BSD license (and similar licenses) are recessive. [...] real organisms inherit half of each parent's genes [...] while software projects inherit all of their parents' licenses.If you don't take all the code, you only inherit the licenses for the code that you take (which actually might, in some cases, be half of the licenses of each parent). Moreover, if you, e.g., take only BSD parts from each parent, your resulting software can be distributed under BSD, even if the parents have GPL parts and therefore have to be distributed (as a whole) under the terms of the GPL, just like a recessive trait can show up in a child of two parents expressing a different, dominant trait. So your analogy is pretty perfect.
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