Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?

Posted Jul 15, 2010 21:50 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft? by dwheeler
Parent article: Quote of the week

> Because of their license, every once in a while a company takes the BSD code and makes a proprietary version... and almost nothing goes back to the BSDs.

It's not the it's proprietary that's the problem for the BSDs, it's that it's under *any* more restrictive license. When people take the BSD code and make modifications under the GPL and use it in Linux, it's just as much a problem for the BSDs. There've been many flamewars on this subject, because some people in the BSD camp seem to feel that it's not fair that Linux gets to take everything from BSD but BSD can't take anything from linux. (Of course, that's kinda the whole point of BSD, so, <shrug>.)

> Examples include [...] and MacOS

And same thing here. Apple makes all the kernel source code available under an Open Source License: the APSL 2.0. It's not proprietary, it's just under a more restrictive license than BSD, like the GPL.

Can copyleft be better than non-copyleft?

Posted Jul 17, 2010 17:08 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> There've been many flamewars on this subject, because some people in the BSD camp seem to feel that it's not fair that Linux gets to take everything from BSD but BSD can't take anything from linux. (Of course, that's kinda the whole point of BSD, so, <shrug>.)

Yeah, this BSD complaint about GPL "stealing" BSD is so ironic. "Be free to take our code, unless it's for the GPL"

The most ironic of all is that the GPL is expressly designed to prevent this problem.