License Committee Report for July 2007

[David Woolley]

Brendan Scott wrote:

> The wording each license uses is different, so this is not obvious to me (eg: the GPL refers to "copying, distribution and modification" as well as "running" the program.  The BSD talks about use and redistribution and (implicitly) modification). 
> 
> Can you explain why you think the BSD permissions are (at least) a superset of those in the GPL? 

One of the reasons goes beyond the wording of the licence.  It is well 
known that BSD's intention was that the code be incorporated into 
proprietary binaries with typical commercial licences, and it is the 
case that Windows, and all modern Unix systems include such code without 
providing source.

-- 
David Woolley
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