Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 4, 2007 17:05 UTC (Tue) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122)
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

My feeling of the whole story: it is BSD guys feeling uneasy of the unprotected nature of the license of their choice.

On legal ground, things that the "GPL community" (as Theo termed) done is perfectly legal in effect, although perhaps not perfectly legal in technicality. If they get something from FreeBSD, they can effectively do anything to it, except to claim it is their work. So if they modify a few files or change the style and calling convention and then redistribute the product, they can claim their modification is under GPL, but the original must still be under BSD. Which is of course the case, the general public can always get their own version directly from BSD. So even though they may not do it the right way (keeping a BSD license in their product, claiming that the work contains BSD work covered by that license, etc., etc.), the effect just need a few trivial modifications to achieve perfectly legally.

On the moral ground, exactly the same thing is done by proprietary software. It is the choice of the BSD people to let them use their code in such "one way sharing". So there really should be nothing immoral for the GPL community to do the same.

Then what the BSD people are really complaining? Why they think it is okay for proprietary software to "import" BSD code to their product, stick a "contains BSD code" label into the product and ship, and then say GPL community will "lose a lot of friends" if they do the same?

The problem is, if developers find something they want to do, and then find that they can do it only if they use proprietary software, it is very likely that some of these developers will start writing a free version of it. On the other hand, if developers find something they want to do, and then find that they can do it only if they use GPL software, a huge number of them will just be abide by GPL. In the long run, the BSD community lose the mind-share they need to keep their projects going.

BSD people can ask themselves why they think BSD, the "unprotected" license, is the way to go. If they can answer themselves, they probably understand that there is nobody to blame. It is just business as normal: if BSD community is based a a flawed model then let it wither by itself, if BSD community is based on a group of people enthusiastic enough to let go their code unprotected then it doesn't matter.

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Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 16, 2007 8:23 UTC (Sun) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

I think the BSD community - or at least Theo de Raadt - finally sees the value of a copyleft license. His interpretation that the BSDL already is a copyleft license however is severely flawed. It isn't. If OpenBSD was under MPL, it would be true, and commercial vendors still could include this code into proprietary projects - but then they would also be forced to contribute changes back (you can put MPL code into "larger works" under different licenses, but you still need to retain the MPL on the files originally under MPL, even if you have modified them - so a MPL project incorporated into a GPL project will be "dual-licensed" forever. There are many open questions about this - one is whether the GPL actually permits to be merged with MPL code without special permission by the authors - but that's the idea at least).

The moral implication however is clear: If we accept that it's ethical to share code (as both the FSF and the BSD proponent claim), then we find that it's also more ethical to make licenses compatible, because incompatible licenses prevent people to share code between projects. I fully agree with that part of Theo's diatribe.