5 ms·
As someone who tends to release on more-permissive licenses, I just want to clarify the causal model here. It's not "doing something extra" to release with BSD
by drostie 14y ago
As someone who tends to release on more-permissive licenses, I just want to clarify the causal model here.
It's not "doing something extra" to release with BSD; the "doing something extra" comes when you want to properly release with GNU.
After a long random walk over the licensing attitudes graph, I have found myself for the last several years stably located at one node. This node is, "licensing is about lawsuits." People often release with the GNU GPL because licensing, for them, is not about lawsuits but has some other import and use -- perhaps moral. But for me, a license is strictly about defining what sorts of lawsuits are possible.
Copyleft is a threat to sue. More precisely, it is the threat "I may sue you if you don't threaten to sue others." And that just sounds crazy. Why would you do that? Well, the stated goal of copyleft is to eliminate all fears of lawsuits by using legal threats.
Let me hasten to add that this is a very pretty idea. If you know the religions of India, this idea is called tantra -- that sometimes the most precise tool for removing a thorn is other thorns, or sometimes the best way to remove dirt from your clothes is with an abrasive substance -- like other (cleaner) dirt. The reason that Stallman is sometimes described as religious may come back to the attendant mysticism that tantric approaches usually bring with them.
My point is, this sort of thinking is an active choice and requires you to enforce the threat, at least in principle. The BSD license is much simpler: it says "I won't sue you, and you're not allowed to sue me." It is a Buddhist-nonviolence approach to eliminating lawsuits: "I have stopped causing suffering in this world, Angulimala -- now why don't you stop?"
It is nothing extra to release this way: you simply promise to not sue anyone, and you only give permission conditional on the fact that they will not sue you, you write it once and then it is done. It's clean and elegant. If you want to actually be a productive GPL licenser, you have to either hope that the threat in the docs is enough, or else find everybody who is "conveying" your software, and slap them with a lawsuit so that they learn how much lawsuits suck.
- Derbasti 14y agoA strange way of looking at it. But it makes a lot of sense.
- udp 14y agoAn upvote wasn't quite enough here: This is a lovely way of explaining the difference, and it'll be what I link people to in future when explaining why I opt for BSD-style licensing. Thank you.
- cygx 14y agoAs lovely as the explanation may be, it focuses on a single issue. The whole point of the GPL is granting and protecting end-user rights - protecting the developer from lawsuits is a secondary concern.
- udp 14y agoWhat end-user rights does the GPL grant or protect that the BSD license doesn't? The right to do whatever the hell they want with the code is granted by the BSD license. I wouldn't say the same for the GPL.
- fdr 14y ago> What end-user rights does the GPL grant or protect that the BSD license doesn't? The right to receive a copy of the implementation of the program they are using and re-distribute it freely. I say "right" here, because in the case of BSD source on the internet it could be more accurately coined an "election" to distribute the source. As you say, "whatever the hell you want." Which is fine. So is requiring copies to carry a complete copy, including the human-readable form, and the rights to redistribute those, ala GPL.
- cygx 14y agoThe end-user is not the developer who re-uses GPL'd code, but the guy who uses the final program. By licensing code under the GPL, you grant the end-user the right to use and modify any program using your code as he sees fit (as long as he adheres to the rules of the GPL on re-distribution), and no intermediate developer can legally take that right away. Of course this restricts the freedom of indermediate developers, but the GPL is intentionally -Ouser, not -Odeveloper. It just so happens that some users are also developers.
- soc88 14y agoI guess I'm just not living in such a companies-are-people and everyone-sues-over-shit country.
- gillianseed 14y agoHmmm... no I have to disagree with the picture you paint here. A licence is not a 'threat to sue', it's a set of conditions for use. Theoretically you could be sued for removing the copyright notice and author attribution from BSD licenced code just as you could be sued for not making the source code available when you distribute GPL licenced code. Furthermore when you talk about 'promising not to sue', as we see today the highest risk of being sued for software is through software patents. GPL says that if you distribute your patented code under GPL you are not allowed to turn around and sue people using that code or any derivates of it. The BSD licence makes no such provisions and as such you could release patented code under BSD and the proceed to sue people using it.
- icebraining 14y agoI think viewing licenses as just about lawsuits is a reductionist take on the issue. A license can provide a strong indication of your wishes even if you don't ever intend to sue. I don't think it "requires you to enforce the threat" to be effective as a signal to others, particularly companies. Now, you could say putting a note that isn't part of the license would have the same effect, but I find that hard to believe.
- harshreality 14y agoI love your comparison gpl and bsd licenses to different religions/philsophical ways of dealing with violence. However, the game theoretic consequences of absolute non-violence (as in Jainism) are negative, unless non-violence is adhered to by everyone in the neighborhood. Or, I suppose you could say instead that non-violence is not a principle to be taken alone. In order to be effective and safe, you have to divest yourself of anything worth stealing, avoid creating interpersonal problems, and stay out of environments where you might be caught up in unrelated violence. Since copyright has no meaning in isolated or pure environments like that, the analogy breaks down. Copyright is fundamentally a social and legal construct, not a philosophical one. It's not quite accurate to draw the comparison with a 2-clause BSD license though. Relinquishing copyright and placing code into the public domain would be more pure. Authors licensing code under a 2-clause BSD license are threatening to sue if proper attribution is not kept. 3 and 4 clauses licenses add more promises to sue under some conditions.