For Approval: Microsoft Permissive License

[Donovan Hawkins]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007, John Cowan wrote:

> Donovan Hawkins scripsit:
>
>> I wasn't referring to whether the BSDL is considered "free", but rather
>> the fact that the GPL is. GPL does not grant you the freedom to closed
>> source a derivative work, for example. Thus it is less free (in the
>> conventional sense) than BSDL, which grants every reasonable freedom one
>> could grant for gratis software.
>
> That is, it grants *software developers* every reasonable freedom.
> Their customers, however, may or may or not be granted any freedom.
> Since there are more customers than developers, the GPL may well
> grant more freedoms in aggregate.

It grants everyone the same freedoms, and those freedoms are a subset of 
what BSDL grants (which is why GPL is compatible with BSDL). Whether it 
leads to more "free" software replacing what would have been closed 
software is a possibility...obviously that's the whole point of it...but 
it doesn't make the GPL itself more free. The GPL is restrictive by 
design.

I really don't want to debate the merits of copyleft here. I have used the 
GPL as an example of what I consider a similar set of restrictions to 
argue why the MS-PL is not a permissive license. I'll leave it at that.

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Donovan Hawkins, PhD                 "The study of physics will always be
Software Engineer                     safer than biology, for while the
hawkins at cephira.com                   hazards of physics drop off as 1/r^2,
http://www.cephira.com                biological ones grow exponentially."
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