Optimal license for Java projects ...

[David Johnson]

On Thursday 13 March 2003 09:32 am, Gunther Schadow wrote:

> - The problem of the BSD license is that it allows commercial
>    parties to take the source code away and contribute little, and
>    take away the freedom of their customers to use improved versions
>    of the free code

You've completely misunderstood the nature of the BSD license. First, 
commercial parties cannot take source code away any more than they 
could take water away from an ocean. It may look like they are, but if 
you check, the free source code is still there and the ocean isn't any 
smaller. Second, they can't take away their customer's freedom to use 
improved versions, because the free source code is still there and the 
ocean is still huge.

It seems to me that what you don't want is something much different. You 
don't want a commercial company being more successful than a 
noncommercial entity. You whole horrible scenario of MicroToast forcing 
burnt toast on their customers can easily occur anyway, regardless of 
license. All MicroToast has to do is to implement their own YML suite. 

As a reference, I point you to BSD licensed Kerberos. For a few days in 
history, every GPL advocate in the country was talking about how 
horrible it was that Kerberos wasn't under the GPL. "If only it weren't 
under the BSD", they said. But then it turned out that Microsoft didn't 
use the BSD licensed code to begin with! They implemented their version 
from scratch! Even RMS had to back track a bit and rewrite an interview 
he gave(1).

The point is, your scenario has never occured. But the scenario of 
MicroToast implementing their own stuff from scratch has happened 
innumerable times. So licenses alone aren't going to save you.

> So, what is the best open source license that Hans Hacker should
> have used?

It seems to me that the best solution for Hans' paranoia is the LGPL. It 
gives most of the benefits of the BSD license in that it can be used to 
promote a standard YML implementation, but with just enough copyleft to 
eliminate his paranoia.

-- 
David Johnson
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(1) <http://www.nutters.org/log/stallman3>
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