[License-discuss] BSD, MIT [was Re: Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.]

[Henrik Ingo]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 6:35 PM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> > do not belong in a first-class list here in 2012. Apache fills the
> > same purpose[1] (permissive license) while being better drafted and
> > properly handling patents.
>
> > Without getting into other issues, I'd hope we can agree that BSD/MIT
> All true, and I greatly favor Apache.  But BSD/MIT are well-understood
> and still extremely pervasive.  Looking at Google Code, which was
> founded fairly recently, Apache dominates; looking at Sourceforge and
> Freshmeat, MIT and BSD dominate.
>
> So put Apache before MIT/BSD, but don't drop them altogether.
>
> +1

In fact, MIT/BSD will continue to serve a few very important use cases: We
have projects which will forever be GPLv2 licensed: Linux and MySQL are the
2 that come quickly to mind.

We have people who wish to publish code that is permissively licensed, yet
can be combined with those GPLv2 projects. Now we have the issue that FSF
considers the Apache License incompatible with the GPLv2, so (whether or
not you agree with the FSF), then in practice using Apache License is not
an option. BSD (or MIT) is what we in practice end up using in these cases.

There's also the fact that many people like to have as short a license as
possible. While there are good reasons why Apache License is longer than
BSD (that's why it's a better license), I would say the BSD/MIT licenses
are "good enough" to cater to this need.

henrik
-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
+358-40-8211286 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

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