Discuss: BSD Protection License

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Colin Percival (colin.percival at wadham.ox.ac.uk):

> There is a tradition that once a project has adopted a given license
> (eg, the BSD operating systems and the BSD license), further work is
> incorporated under the same license.  This merely formalizes that.

I may regret getting suckered into this discussion, but:

You don't _need_ special licence terms to accomplish that.  All you need
to do is accept only patches and modules contributed under your
preferred licence.  If you don't like code that's under some other
licence, take it out and replace it.  That is what the OpenBSD
Foundation did with their OpenSSH fork of Ylönen's SSH 1.2.12 (following
Björn Grönvall's example with ossh).  Send them a GPLed patch and
they'll say "Thanks, no."  Start maintaining a fork of their codebase
with GPLed additions of your own, and they'll ignore it.  And everyone's
happy.  The (perceived) problem is headed off by a consistent "Well,
don't do that, then" policy.

What you've written is, at best, a solution in search of a problem.  
(My view; yours for a small royalty fee and disclaimer of
reverse-engineering rights.)

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                           Never ask a sysadmin "What's up?"
rick at linuxmafia.com
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