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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tzeng, Nigel H. (Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu):

> It amazes me that after all these years GPL proponents are still
> professing willful ignorance as to why some permissive developers see a
> difference between the two practices.  Go figure.

I am not, and never have been, in any sense a 'GPL proponent', sir.

I regard licences as legal instruments to implement the licensor's 
intents.  What their intents are, obviously, differ.  It would therefore
be the height of folly to ideologically urge one particular family of
licences, let alone any particular licence, and I do my best not to be a
fool.

> Perhaps because a proprietary derivative doesn't impact the potential pool
> of open source contributors but a GPL derivative does?

Here's something interesting:  I talk about copyleft, and about the
alleged '{relicensing|sublicensing}' of BSD works actually just turning
out to refer to creation of derivative works, and someone who wants to
argue with me starts talking about the GPL, as if there were no other
copyleft licences.  This is peculiar at the bset of times, but doubly so
on the OSI's mailing lists.

Anyway, a proprietary derivative permits _zero_ open source contributors,
right?  Or did I somehow fail to understand what 'proprietary' means?

> Perhaps it is human nature to be annoyed when some very vocal folks claim
> to be more "free" and that you should respect the spirit of their license
> but not actually reciprocate that "freedom" with permissive developers or
> the same level of respect?

_Stallman_ does that, but you seem to be confusing the merits of
licences with those of their authors.  The meaning of each licence itself
is confined to its wording and its surrounding legal environment.  By
contrast, interpersonal soap opera doesn't mean a thing.

> Nah, that's only been stated umpteen times over the many years among
> various other reasons.

Yes, and I'm a BSD user from back to long before Net/2.  Now that you've
trotted out your prejudices irrelevantly, it'd be nice, as I just got
through saying, if a few folks stopped assuming I'm new to these topics.