Help with license decision for "cluster" of similar projects

[Bjorn Reese]

On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 18:07, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>   This is quickly off-topic for this list again.  I wonder if there needs
> to be an @opensource.org discussion group for discussing the business 
> model and legal analysis of license agreements beyond the question of 
> approving them as OSI compliant?

There are Free Software Business list <fsb at crynwr.com> and the Free
Software License discussion list
<http://lists.alt.org/mailman/listinfo/fsl-discuss>.

However, both of these seems to have lost momentum.

>   The main feature of a BSD-like (non-copyleft) license is that it allows
> non-free derivatives.  Non-free software minimizes the freedom to develop
> derivative code of that non-free software.  So +1-1=0, meaning that
> BSD-like licenses do not maximize the freedom to develop code as it
> appears in the short term, but in fact minimizes long-term freedom to
> develop the code.

In all the discussions about software "freedom" that I have
witnessed over the years, the main disagreement has had its origin
in the confusion due to different perceptions of the word "freedom."

Proponents of copyleft generally speak of "freedom" for the
community; e.g. proprietary derivations are considered "non-free"
because they are not immediately available to the entire community.

Proponents of non-copyleft generally speak of "freedom" for the
individual; e.g. the individual developer has the "freedom" to
decide whether or not he wants to share the derivations (or more
correctly, his effort that went into those.)

The above is, of course, a generalization and not universally valid.


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