For Approval: Open Source Software Alliance License

John Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Thu Sep 25 21:53:30 UTC 2003


David Presotto scripsit:

> While true, that might be awfully hard to do since the two parts
> will not be explicitly delineated.  A few generations down the
> line and heredity becomes pretty fuzzy.  The viral/inheritive/
> freedom-fighting nature of the GPL will always scare some companies
> from expressly not doing that when creating proprietary forks.
> They'ld rather go with a version whose ancestry can be
> defined.

Safer to go back to the original BSD-ish code.  In the current climate,
it's unlikely that any open-source code once released can be lost forever --
too many archives.

> - finding stolen code in open source a few years
>  down the line and getting into a SCO-IBM like battle

The chance of that is nearly nil, IMHO (IANAL, TINLA).  Most GPL violations
are innocent and/or ignorant, and get resolved early and quietly, according
to Eben Moglen, who does most of the enforcing, or "enforcing".

-- 
Work hard,                                      John Cowan
play hard,                                      jcowan at reutershealth.com
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