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This whole idea started because copyright is broken. Both licenses are artifacts of this. The original copyright had a term of 14 years, a reasonable balance
by snarfy 14y ago
This whole idea started because copyright is broken. Both licenses are artifacts of this. The original copyright had a term of 14 years, a reasonable balance when granting a limited monopoly. As they extended the term and strengthened the laws, there is no longer any balance and there is nothing limited about the monopoly.
Somewhere in all of this, their is an ideal copyright law with ideal terms and limits which maximizes the progress of science and useful arts.
I believe the success of the BSD license shows it is closer to the optimum than the GPL.
- dllthomas 14y agoMore than that, the original copyright was something you paid for, it lasted 7 years, and then you paid more for a one time extension of another 7 years. So some things fell into the public domain even faster than 14 years.
- gillianseed 14y ago>I believe the success of the BSD license shows it is closer to the optimum than the GPL. Well the GPL licence is the most used open source licence of all, so I'm not sure how 'the success of the BSD licence' would somehow show it as being closer to the 'optimum'.
- DanBC 14y agoHow are you measuring "most used"?
- gillianseed 14y agoBy what most open source code projects are licenced as.
- DanBC 14y agoIn theory you could have a million projects used by very few people under one licence, and a few projects used by very many people under another licence. It might be interesting to know how many people use software under each licence.
- snarfy 14y agoNot only is it interesting, it's a better metric when determining the value software brings to society. This is about the optimum in 'promoting the arts and sciences'. The project count is irrelevant.