| GPL vs BSD: why are people fighting? |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 07 September 2007 | |
      
The first time, in April this year, a developer for a Linux wireless driver accused an OpenBSD developer of filching code and using it in a wireless driver for OpenBSD. In the last week of August a second flamefest came about: this time, a Linux developer was accused of removing the BSD licence notice from a snippet of dual-licensed code and releasing that code solely under the GPL. You can read most of the saga here , beginning with the first message. I won't go into the details of the flamefest - if you, gentle reader, enjoy such things, read and enjoy. To get an idea of why these people are at each others' throats every now and then, one needs to understand a little bit about the two licences. Linux, the kernel, is released under the GPL. The BSD licence gives anyone the freedom to take code released under it and re-use it in any system and lock it up altogether. Thus the makers of proprietary software love the BSD licence - they can take whatever they like, use it in their own proprietary applications and lock it up for good. No changes have to be released back. To quote from the licence template itself: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. "Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission." Curiously, the BSD people, who have no objection to their code being locked up for good in proprietary applications, raise hell when someone uses the GPL instead. Why? The only thing that the GPL ensures is that any code released under it will be free thereafter. However, it does restrict any future derivative work to being released under the GPL. The GPL is a pragmatic licence - I use this adjective to describe it because the man who devised it obviously understood one major failing of the human race. Richard Stallman factored in the human desire to take and not give when he drafted the original GPL. With human nature in mind, he laid down one stipulation in the GPL - you can take freely and use; if it's only for yourself and not being redistributed (for a fee or without a fee) then, if you change the code to suit your own needs, those changes can remain with you. The changes do not have to be made public. However, if you do redistribute the code, then you have to release all the changes you made. And it has to be under the same licence, the GPL. This ensures that the same rights afforded to you are continued downstream. There are thousands of definitions of what constitutes a derivative work and we can argue about that for the rest of the year. I'm not going down that path - not now, anyway. There appears to be some jealousy among the BSD folks when it comes to Linux. Simply because Linux is more successful than any of the BSDs - or even all of them put together. The vitriol comes out at times like this when there are clashes over licences or anything else. Conversely, the Linux people seem to hate the BSD licence with a passion. I like the GPL because it imposes accountability, something which people always seem to avoid like the plague - and these days it has reached pandemic proportions. And the GPL is neither against capitalism nor commerce, though companies like Microsoft would have people believe otherwise. On the other hand, the BSD licence is non-restrictive and allows proprietary vendors to knock off anything they like. In the end it comes down to a matter of personal preference; you can pick which one you like, depending on what kind of future you want for your code - once you are clear where each licence will lead you. |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
