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Jumping the licensing shark

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted May 5, 2023 9:25 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Jumping the licensing shark by farnz
Parent article: Jumping the licensing shark

I agree largely with your framing of that divide.

Though, for whatever reason, in my mind it would be the "open source" side who are the "just use the code, don't really enforce" types, and the Free Software ones would be "Either you follow the licence to the letter, or you don't use it at all". E.g., Look at the FSF position on firmware.

But the exact labels matter less. That divide is certainly there. In my mind, the strong-enforcement view was more dominant earlier on, and the "softly softly" developed later, as the economic-goodness (for everyone and for developers) argument was developed ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" being an example of the development of that argument for Free Software).


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Jumping the licensing shark

Posted May 5, 2023 18:29 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Though, for whatever reason, in my mind it would be the "open source" side who are the "just use the code, don't really enforce" types, and the Free Software ones would be "Either you follow the licence to the letter, or you don't use it at all". E.g., Look at the FSF position on firmware.

FWIW, I'd agree with this sentiment.

(Because licenses typically chosen by "open source" folks are tend to not have many (if any) terms that can actually be enforced, whereas "free software" folks chose licenses that have a bit more teeth to them, presumably because they care!)

> But the exact labels matter less. That divide is certainly there. In my mind, the strong-enforcement view was more dominant earlier on, and the "softly softly" developed later, as the economic-goodness (for everyone and for developers) argument was developed ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" being an example of the development of that argument for Free Software).

Yeah, CatB was a major inflection point that led to the "softly softly" folks breaking away from the "strong enforcement" types, and created the "open source" movement in the process.


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