11 ms·

In defense of BSD licenses (response to Zed Shaw)

49 points by fogus 17y ago

embeddedradical 17y ago
if you are trying to make money through dual licensing, GPL is a better route because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the commercial license in order to make their products commercial. This is not true of BSD licenses, and commercial entities can use your software anyway (OS X). I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free. Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive. If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD), it should be addressed as a whole: looking at it in sciences, software, literature, all of it -- for if it is true that we don't need it, or are hampered by it, I don't see how it only applies to software. I'm far more concerned that companies are patenting found genetics than I am that this stupid iphone which erased all my music this morning because I had recently formatted and it thinks it was synced to another computer, and how the new firmware breaks it from musicmonkey again, and now I can't transfer my flac files, and have to use their junky itunes instead -- yah it sucks, but the genetic stuff is even more troublesome - philosophically.
- davidw 17y ago
  > GPL is a better route because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the commercial license They can use your software all they want. They just can't link to it or otherwise tightly integrate it with theirs (the line is a fuzzy one, but generally drawn at linking, IIRC)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - jules 17y ago
    Wrong opinion.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    While I was not the one that downvoted you above, comments speculating as to why you were downvoted are typically discouraged here. (I'm guessing you're somewhat new here since your karma is in the double digits.) They don't really add to the conversion.
- jmillikin 17y ago
  I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free. Free to whom? If you want developers to retain all the rights, there's already a license for that -- "all rights reserved". If you want users to have rights, then the GPL is the best choice. Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive. So because something wildly improbably and likely harmful won't happen, you refuse to use the GPL? Perhaps you don't recognize how bizarre your argument is, so lets apply it to a different situation: Maybe if I thought bicycling stood a chance to ever make it so that all transportation, or at least the majority, was human-powered and long-distance travel was dead...then I would use it. If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD) Nonsense. If somebody doesn't care about copyrights at all, they would release their software into the public domain. Obviously this is an uncommon choice. The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use.
  - embeddedradical 17y ago
    Free to whom? The freedom to use it in commercial software is restricted by the GPL. For this reason I consider the BSD/MIT licenses more free, for it says nothing except, go ahead use it, tinker with it, change it, republish it, whatever. Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software. The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use). Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.
tspiteri 17y ago
The BSD license allows someone to take the code, improve it, and not share the improvements, which may sometimes lead to fragmentation. This happened in the Wine project, where some companies used the free Wine code and added closed improvements. Improvements to Wine were merged to the closed product, but improvements to the closed product could not be used by Wine. The licence of Wine was changed to the LGPL to stop this.
tptacek 17y ago
The fact that Zed wrote Mongrel and got no recognition is possibly an indictment of several things: the RoR buzzstorm, the Rails community, the “OMG Ruby is the new Java for Web 2.0″ technorati, maybe even venture capitalists. But it is not an indictment of the BSD license. Here's where I stopped reading.
- batasrki 17y ago
  Yeah, myself as well. I don't understand this bitterness that comes from the Python community. Or maybe, it's just a vocal minority. There was no need for this in the article.
  - pwang 17y ago
    Can you please point out the parts of my blog entry that are "bitter"? Or was that one line - whose sole purpose was to mirror and acknowledge Zed's colored history in the Ruby world - enough to paint me as a "bitter" person?
    - batasrki 17y ago
      Zed's "colored history in the Ruby world" is not relevant to your discussion of BSD vs GPL licenses. It feels like you put it in just to stick it to those "awful" Ruby people. Also, your response to my comment doesn't improve or change my opinion of the article. Without that part there, it would've been a perfectly acceptable advance of the discussion of the two license systems. As it is, it damages the your argument. Bitter maybe too harsh a criticism, but since you've chosen to put the irrelevant paragraph that made a side-comment on the Ruby community in an article about OSS licenses, you've pretty much opened yourself up to it.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Could you expound why? I had a boss who hadn't written a line of code in his life ask me if we were using RoR around 2006... Edit: what I mean to say is that the author is correct that there was a lot of baseless Ruby fanboyism.
profquail 17y ago
I've done a little bit of open source work (a few small numerics libraries and the beginning of a small project in PHP) and I always release my stuff under the BSD license. To me, the GPL just doesn't seem 'free' (to reiterate what embeddedradical said earlier). All of the stuff I've written has just been to fill a small hobby and because the only offerings out there were all expensive non-free libraries that I couldn't afford to pay for (not for a hobby, anyway). I seem to remember that the very bottom of the networking stack in Windows was (and may still currently be) based on a BSD sockets implementation. If Microsoft had implemented their own methods from scratch, who's to say that things would be as compatible as they are now? I respect that some authors want recognition (or perhaps a job) as a result of the hard work they put in (for free) on a lot of open source projects. But I think software is much more useful under a license that allows people to do whatever they want with it, commercial or otherwise.
koenbok 17y ago
As a small Mac developer, I respect the GPL, but I don't always get it. For example we created a GUI subversion client for the Mac that is pretty popular. I'm sure that it gave subversion usage on the Mac a boost as now more people can actually use it (half of our customers are not programmers). So our application actually stimulates the usage of subversion, which can't be bad for anyone involved. We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library. Now, if the GPL GUI applications were as great as the commercial ones, there wouldn't be a problem. But for reasons I'm not sure about that doesn't seem to be the case.
- lacker 17y ago
  What's wrong with wrapping the command line?
- nailer 17y ago
  > We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library. Couldn't you re-implement the GIT spec (including making such a spec if it does not exist now)?
  - tlrobinson 17y ago
    Sure, they could, but it would take time away from the interesting features of the application and the user interface (see: http://versionsapp.com/ http://versionsapp.com/)
  - inklesspen 17y ago
    Incidentally, that is how github works, if I'm not mistaken; the 'grit' library (http://github.com/schacon/grit http://github.com/schacon/grit) does as much as possible in pure ruby, falling back to command-line if necessary. It's also licensed under the MIT license, so you could use it in your Cocoa app using MacRuby or whatever.
- boucher 17y ago
artificer 17y ago
Every once in a while that a similar license discussion emerges, I see a clear pattern: Many,many people do not understand the GPL. In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases. This leads to a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler license, such as BSD. b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this situation.

49 points by fogus 17y ago

if you are trying to make money through dual licensing, GPL is a better route because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the commercial license in order to make their products commercial. This is not true of BSD licenses, and commercial entities can use your software anyway (OS X). I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free. Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive. If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD), it should be addressed as a whole: looking at it in sciences, software, literature, all of it -- for if it is true that we don't need it, or are hampered by it, I don't see how it only applies to software. I'm far more concerned that companies are patenting found genetics than I am that this stupid iphone which erased all my music this morning because I had recently formatted and it thinks it was synced to another computer, and how the new firmware breaks it from musicmonkey again, and now I can't transfer my flac files, and have to use their junky itunes instead -- yah it sucks, but the genetic stuff is even more troublesome - philosophically.

davidw 17y ago
> GPL is a better route because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the commercial license They can use your software all they want. They just can't link to it or otherwise tightly integrate it with theirs (the line is a fuzzy one, but generally drawn at linking, IIRC)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- jules 17y ago
  Wrong opinion.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  While I was not the one that downvoted you above, comments speculating as to why you were downvoted are typically discouraged here. (I'm guessing you're somewhat new here since your karma is in the double digits.) They don't really add to the conversion.
jmillikin 17y ago
I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free. Free to whom? If you want developers to retain all the rights, there's already a license for that -- "all rights reserved". If you want users to have rights, then the GPL is the best choice. Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive. So because something wildly improbably and likely harmful won't happen, you refuse to use the GPL? Perhaps you don't recognize how bizarre your argument is, so lets apply it to a different situation: Maybe if I thought bicycling stood a chance to ever make it so that all transportation, or at least the majority, was human-powered and long-distance travel was dead...then I would use it. If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD) Nonsense. If somebody doesn't care about copyrights at all, they would release their software into the public domain. Obviously this is an uncommon choice. The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use.
- embeddedradical 17y ago
  Free to whom? The freedom to use it in commercial software is restricted by the GPL. For this reason I consider the BSD/MIT licenses more free, for it says nothing except, go ahead use it, tinker with it, change it, republish it, whatever. Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software. The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use). Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.

tspiteri 17y ago

The BSD license allows someone to take the code, improve it, and not share the improvements, which may sometimes lead to fragmentation. This happened in the Wine project, where some companies used the free Wine code and added closed improvements. Improvements to Wine were merged to the closed product, but improvements to the closed product could not be used by Wine. The licence of Wine was changed to the LGPL to stop this.

tptacek 17y ago

The fact that Zed wrote Mongrel and got no recognition is possibly an indictment of several things: the RoR buzzstorm, the Rails community, the “OMG Ruby is the new Java for Web 2.0″ technorati, maybe even venture capitalists. But it is not an indictment of the BSD license. Here's where I stopped reading.

batasrki 17y ago
Yeah, myself as well. I don't understand this bitterness that comes from the Python community. Or maybe, it's just a vocal minority. There was no need for this in the article.
- pwang 17y ago
  Can you please point out the parts of my blog entry that are "bitter"? Or was that one line - whose sole purpose was to mirror and acknowledge Zed's colored history in the Ruby world - enough to paint me as a "bitter" person?
  - batasrki 17y ago
    Zed's "colored history in the Ruby world" is not relevant to your discussion of BSD vs GPL licenses. It feels like you put it in just to stick it to those "awful" Ruby people. Also, your response to my comment doesn't improve or change my opinion of the article. Without that part there, it would've been a perfectly acceptable advance of the discussion of the two license systems. As it is, it damages the your argument. Bitter maybe too harsh a criticism, but since you've chosen to put the irrelevant paragraph that made a side-comment on the Ruby community in an article about OSS licenses, you've pretty much opened yourself up to it.
andreyf 17y ago
Could you expound why? I had a boss who hadn't written a line of code in his life ask me if we were using RoR around 2006... Edit: what I mean to say is that the author is correct that there was a lot of baseless Ruby fanboyism.

profquail 17y ago

I've done a little bit of open source work (a few small numerics libraries and the beginning of a small project in PHP) and I always release my stuff under the BSD license. To me, the GPL just doesn't seem 'free' (to reiterate what embeddedradical said earlier). All of the stuff I've written has just been to fill a small hobby and because the only offerings out there were all expensive non-free libraries that I couldn't afford to pay for (not for a hobby, anyway). I seem to remember that the very bottom of the networking stack in Windows was (and may still currently be) based on a BSD sockets implementation. If Microsoft had implemented their own methods from scratch, who's to say that things would be as compatible as they are now? I respect that some authors want recognition (or perhaps a job) as a result of the hard work they put in (for free) on a lot of open source projects. But I think software is much more useful under a license that allows people to do whatever they want with it, commercial or otherwise.

koenbok 17y ago

As a small Mac developer, I respect the GPL, but I don't always get it. For example we created a GUI subversion client for the Mac that is pretty popular. I'm sure that it gave subversion usage on the Mac a boost as now more people can actually use it (half of our customers are not programmers). So our application actually stimulates the usage of subversion, which can't be bad for anyone involved. We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library. Now, if the GPL GUI applications were as great as the commercial ones, there wouldn't be a problem. But for reasons I'm not sure about that doesn't seem to be the case.

lacker 17y ago
What's wrong with wrapping the command line?
nailer 17y ago
> We get a lot of questions wether we can also make a Git/Mercurial client, but the GPL makes that really hard as we would have to wrap the command line or make an open source communication library. Couldn't you re-implement the GIT spec (including making such a spec if it does not exist now)?
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  Sure, they could, but it would take time away from the interesting features of the application and the user interface (see: http://versionsapp.com/ http://versionsapp.com/)
- inklesspen 17y ago
  Incidentally, that is how github works, if I'm not mistaken; the 'grit' library (http://github.com/schacon/grit http://github.com/schacon/grit) does as much as possible in pure ruby, falling back to command-line if necessary. It's also licensed under the MIT license, so you could use it in your Cocoa app using MacRuby or whatever.
boucher 17y ago

artificer 17y ago

Every once in a while that a similar license discussion emerges, I see a clear pattern: Many,many people do not understand the GPL. In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases. This leads to a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler license, such as BSD. b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this situation.