Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 03 September 2009 07:43

Opinion and Analysis

Debates about the pros and cons of various licences available to free and open source software developers often end up generating more heat than light.


But on Monday, the Ottawa-based Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre held an event at which the merits and demerits of the Eclipse Public Licence, the General Public Licence and the BSD Licence were debated by three experts - and which contributed greatly to an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of all three licences.

Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, advocated for the EPL; Alfresco business development vice-president Matt Asay spoke for the GPL; and David Maxwell , an open source strategist for Coverity, put forward the pluses of the BSD licence.

Each was given 10 minutes for primary arguments; five minutes for rebuttal and a minute each for summation. The three then fielded questions from both a web audience and those present; the Q and A session was not part of the debate proper in that it was not taken into account when judging the winner.

Milinkovich pointed out that the EPL requires that changes made to code be contributed back under the very same licence. But people can build products on top of EPL-licensed code under commercial licences. These products can also be compiled into binaries and sold under commercial licences.

The EPL also has a patent retaliation clause and thus finds favour with big businesses like IBM. It is approved by the Free Software Foundation.

The degree of trust created by the GPL, that someone could not hijack another's code, was stressed by Asay. He pointed out that the fundamental ethos of open source was sharing and the power it had came from this aspect.

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