Relicensing: what's legal and what's right
Relicensing: what's legal and what's right
Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:49 UTC (Wed) by nofutureuk (subscriber, #3116)In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by dag-
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right
You say that it is logically/ethically the correct decision that you contribute changes to someone else's codebase. If I would expect that, I would put that requirement in the license (ie. choose GPL).I said before that forcing other people into adopting ones ethical view-point in legal terms, is something that can be avoided. There is a difference between ethics and law.
However, you then say that you choose the BSD license so that you can reuse the same stuff you wrote at work. Now, the stuff you write yourself is never the problem, even with GPL you are the copyright owner and you can do what you like.Right, my example is wrong. Sorry ;-)
So you prefer that other people use the BSD license so one has the liberty to use their code at one's company, modify it, distribute it without the requirement that any changes have to go back.Ok, consider I publish code with GPL license and somebody sends me a patch to fix/enhance something. Will I be allowed to re-use that patch in a closed environment in my company? I mean, open-sourcing your own code is about solving a problem you have and hoping that others have the same problem and therefore they will hopefully help minimize your own work. It really is about being lazy in the first place (at least to me, that again is not something I would want to push on others).
I don't denounce people using the liberty of re-using code, but I denounce people saying that the BSD people should shut up when they feel ripped off.
I also denounce people who replace licenses without agreement (although in this case, it was probably right, but I said "people").
Also, I see there is competition, yes, but that's just fine. Competition always helps improve the overall result.
At work, one is not allowed to relicense the source-code. That is not a liberty unless agreed with all parties.
In general terms, having conflicting expectations is perfectly normal. It really depends on the context. You cannot have absolute expectations in a world full of relativity.
My point is that other people are falling back into lame "legality" discussions, whereas this whole topic factually is much more about the very reasons of existence of open-source software and liberal licensing schemes:
- Why does one open-source code (not hide it)?
- Why does one allow others to re-use it?
- ... etc.
Also note that everybody's perception certainly has an influence on what we see happen and what we don't see happen. I mean, I am not reading LKML on any sort of regular basis... so I want to make sure that my concern is not at all about Linux people or all GPL people, but pure and only about those people that try to re-use these kind of moments (the patch above) to push their propaganda for the "right" license. That's something that does not help anyone.
dag- you definitely have some good points. thx for your input