In defense of BSD licenses (response to Zed Shaw)

http://pwang.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/in-defense-of-bsd-licenses-response-to-zed-shaw/

by fogus • 17 years ago

49 37 17 years ago

pwang.wordpress.com

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.

jmillikin6• 17 years ago

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.

embeddedradical2• 17 years 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.

petercooper• 17 years ago

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.

What rights do software users benefit from with GPL licensed software that they do not with BSD licensed software?

You seem to make the point a couple of times that the GPL is more free and gives more rights to users.. could you elaborate on that as, to how I see it currently, little is more free than the BSD license except the public domain. The GPL places all sorts of restrictions on users if they choose to modify the software.

ubernostrum2• 17 years ago

"If you want users to have rights"

Depends on the users you're talking about.

The GPL trades away some of your freedom right now to maximize the potential freedom of people who have not yet received the software.

The BSD license maximizes your freedom now at the potential expense of the freedom of people who have not yet received the software.

As someone who builds and uses tools for developers, BSD is thus more useful to me, because it grants the maximum freedom to the people I target -- myself, and other developers to whom I distribute BSD-licensed tools.

costan• 17 years ago

Releasing software into the public domain is tricky.

I don't know a good way to do that, without running the risk that big company M will take the software, get a patent on it, and then sue me for writing my own software. Disclaimer: this is an over-simplification.

I wanted to point out that simply releasing code into the public domain can bite back. I use the MIT license because it's as close as possible. The BSD license has too much baggage due to that stupid advertising clause in the old 4-clause version.

davidw• 17 years 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)

tspiteri• 17 years 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.

tptacek3• 17 years 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.

batasrki2• 17 years 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.

pwang2• 17 years 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?

andreyf• 17 years 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.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

And?

Short answer: because life's too short to read an essay about software licensing that appears to be shot through with commentary about the failings of the Ruby/Rails community. Am I wrong, and there was no RoR commentary after that graf? Oh well.

profquail• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

nailer• 17 years 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)?

tlrobinson2• 17 years 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/)

inklesspen• 17 years ago

Incidentally, that is how github works, if I'm not mistaken; the 'grit' library (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.

lacker• 17 years ago

What's wrong with wrapping the command line?

boucher2• 17 years ago

Hey Koen!

From the perspective of a person who chooses the GPL license for their code, the issue is that they want to the right to take your changes and then modify them as they see fit.

The GPL prefers that right over everything else, including overall use of any particular program or library. GPL advocates would suggest that it is in fact bad that you've increased the use of subversion, because you've done it in a way that all those new users can't go in and fix bugs in your program, or change some behavior that they feel needs changing.

I think one of the reasons people fail to understand this argument is that they see a complete disconnect between end users and developers. In other words, an end user is someone who will never even want to edit source code. I'm inclined to think this is usually true, but the authors of the GPL are the exception to that rule, and it is one of the primary reasons that the GPL exists.

As far as the git client is concerned, wrapping the command line, as you suggested, basically solves the problem. It's also probably not that hard. In fact, there are a couple ruby libraries that do it I believe, and maybe python ones as well, if you're still doing PyObjc.

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

LGPL would be a good choice for something like Git, so you can still use it in proprietary software, but any improvements to Git itself must be contributed back.

artificer• 17 years 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.

In defense of BSD licenses (response to Zed Shaw)

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