BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 2, 2010 22:00 UTC (Sat) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
In reply to: Drizzle? Nope, still GPL/owned by Sun. by hingo
Parent article: The ongoing MySQL campaign

On the contrary, projects run under the BSD license are about as far away as
you can get from copyright assignment. With copyright assignment, the
copyright owners monopolize the distribution of the code under alternative
licenses. With the BSD license, anyone can do so. In other words, under the
BSD license, there is no monopoly at all.

A GPL project without copyright assignment, on the other hand, is designed to
create a monopoly in favor of the public. And a GPL project with copyright
assignment is designed to create a monopoly in favor of the interests of the
copyright holder.

Of course with BSD style licenses people can fork off little monopolies, but
with few exceptions, that usually doesn't work so well, or rather it is
usually in everyone's best interest to continue to work on a common code
base. How many successful Apache forks are there out there?

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BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 2, 2010 22:11 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (4 responses)

> On the contrary, projects run under the BSD license are about as far away as
> you can get from copyright assignment.

Sure, but here we have a project where the majority of whose code is owned by Sun and licensed
under the GPL, but where *everyone else's* contributions are required to be licensed under BSD.
That creates essentially the same resulting conditions as copyright assignment to Sun.

BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 2, 2010 23:11 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

Overtime, Drizzle could move towards essentially being a permissively
licensed project in the longer run and while that might leave open the
possibility of proprietary forks, it doesn't create a monopoly like
copyright assignment does. The catch in the Drizzle project however is that
Sun employees are NOT licensing their contributions under the BSD. So they
have different rules depending on whether or not you are employee of Sun or
not. That's bad.

Unfortunately Sun seems to be doing it worse on all the Sun managed
projects including Openoffice.org, OpenJDK etc where they demand copyright
assignment and it hurts them and the project they manage pretty badly.

BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 5:38 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not convinced. After all, the egcs developers successfully forked and then took over gcc development, even though the copyrights were assigned to the FSF the whole time.

It certainly made matters delicate, in that relations had to be maintained with the FSF during a very tense time. But a group of people who didn't own the copyright successfully put out releases that became the dominant branch of development for a couple of years.

For that reason, I'm confident that Oracle can't kill MySQL. It's true that Monty can't make money on non-GPL commercial licensing of the code or a derivative of the code, and maybe that's his angle.

BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 11:19 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

I am in agreement with you that Oracle can't kill MySQL because of this. My
argument was never that forking is not possible in a project that requires
copyright assignment. It is merely that copyright assignments creates a
privileged position for one entity. In that case of FSF, it allows them to
relicense code to GPLv3 or later. In the case of Sun or Oracle, it allows
them to sell proprietary versions.

Note however there are some fundamental differences betweeen GCC and MySQL.
Applications that are compiled with GCC aren't affected by the GCC license.
Applications that link to MySQL database are.

BSD license vs. copyright assignment

Posted Jan 3, 2010 18:24 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> Applications that link to MySQL database are.

Yeah, it was pretty annoying when MySQL AB changed the license on their client library from LGPL
to GPL...

But if it's really a problem, the fork of MySQL can rewrite the client library from scratch, and that
will be that.