This is one of the rare occasions where I think Theo is right

Posted Sep 6, 2007 7:38 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: This is one of the rare occasions where I think Theo is right by proski
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Sure. But there is one legitimate point coming from the BSD-camp.

Linux benefited by being allowed to copy their code.

If we then later find bugs in the same code, or make improvements to it, it would be nice of us to share those improvements and bugfixes with the BSD-people. Which means allowing those improvements to be distributed under the BSD-licence.

Currently, the code from BSD is BSD/GPL, but any improvements we add along the way, will be GPL. Which means the BSD-people aren't free to grab the improvements back.

The BSD-licence explicitly allows these kinds of things though, the major difference between GPL and BSD is precisely the fact that with GPL you need to publish your improved version under the same licence (if you distribute it anyway) while with BSD-code that is not a legal requirement.

The fact that it's not a legal requirement does however not mean it ain't the rigth thing to do.

It would be nice if anyone making bugfixes and/or improvements to this driver would explicitly licence those bugfixes/improvements under BSD+GPL, so that the BSD-people *would* be free to grab the improvements back.

I second other commenters though: If developers don't like the idea that others may take their code and then refuse to contribute improvements back, they'd be well-adviced to choose a licence that doesn't permit precisely that.