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User andinus provided the official explanation given by the openbsd project. On a more philosophical level, the more radical end of the BSD licensing champions
by jabl 6y ago
User andinus provided the official explanation given by the openbsd project.
On a more philosophical level, the more radical end of the BSD licensing champions such as openbsd are extremists, just like the FSF/GNU people on the other end of the spectrum. Both want a world where ultimately software copyright, not to mention software patents, doesn't exist, source is available for everything and you can use that source for any purpose you like etc. They just have different ways of working towards that goal. The GNU end came up with a legal trick to use copyright law to try to force people to open up their software (copyleft licensing), whereas the BSD radicals just wish the whole copyright crap would go away and thus use the simplest possible license they can come up with.
So the Apache-2.0 license, although in many ways a BSD-like license, is written by and for corporate lawyers, which grates the openbsd people to no end.
- carapace 6y ago"extremists"? Really? If anything the folks who want software copyrights and patents are the "extreme" POV, no? I mean, on the hardware level we're talking about MOV instructions, eh?
- jabl 6y agoUh, maybe I should have worded that differently. I didn't mean "extremist" as a value judgement. Just someone being on the extreme end of the spectrum "all software should be free" vs. "all software should be proprietary and patented". Edit: And now I see that in my grandparent post I wrote that the BSD and GPL people are extremists on opposite sides of the spectrum, which doesn't really match the above. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that, what I wanted to write was that they are both on the same end of the spectrum.
- carapace 6y agoCheers! We're cool. (FWIW I think it's a high-dimensional manifold, not a spectrum. But I feel ya.) ;-)