Do they think the BSD license is restrictive?

Posted Aug 19, 2003 21:09 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Why SCO won't show the code

If I understand their claims about the GPL, they are saying that the conditions the GPL places on distribution (etc) are insufficient to prevent the work from falling into the public domain, and thus anything properly licensed under the GPL may be treated as public domain. (That is, they don't mean that the GPL is an invalid license, which would make them massive copyright violators in their own eyes, if no one else's, but rather that releasing a work under the GPL removes any copyright protection on it, and thus they can use it without being bound by the terms of the GPL)

Surely if the GPL's restrictions are not sufficient to prevent a work from being essentially in the public domain, the BSD license, which has nothing but the advertizing clause to make it more restrictive than the GPL is similarly unenforceable. This means that they must believe the code on which they're founding their claims to be in the public domain.