[License-discuss] proposal to revise and slightly reorganize the OSI licensing pages

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jun 7, 2012, at 8:33 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> My surmise is that the thing being referred to as '{sublicensing|relicensing} 
> of BSD works' is in fact stating the licensing for a derivative.

Probably.  My own opinion is that folks who do anything less than a substantial
rewrite of software ought to release their changes under the same license as
the original source.

However, permissive licenses were explicitly designed to permit closed-source
reuse; that's considered a feature by the authors who chose such licenses.

> A certain number of the BSD regulars remain deeply unhappy when those
> works state copyleft requirements, even though they're perfectly happy
> when derivatives of the same BSD works have proprietary licenses.  Go
> figure.

I don't know anyone with a commit bit to a BSD-derived OS who is
"perfectly happy" when a proprietary system derives from BSD code, but
it's not considered unusual or a matter of concern.

What is a matter of concern is when someone removes a copyright statement
and the BSD license terms from source code, and replaces that with the GPL.
Of course, it would be exactly the same matter of concern if someone replaced
the copyright and BSD license terms with the MPL, CDDL, APSL, or any other
license.

I'm thinking of the g4u vs g4l situation.  Although it no longer seems useful
for me to interact with NetBSD, I do agree with Andy Ruhl's take:

  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2004/09/17/0003.html

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck