[License-review] For Approval: Scripting Free Software License, Version 1.3.6 (S-FSL v1.3.6)

Tzeng, Nigel H. Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu
Tue Nov 19 16:25:36 UTC 2013


On 11/19/13 9:10 AM, "Elmar Stellnberger" <estellnb at gmail.com> wrote:

>   Concerning your BSD project I do really consider it a pity that you
>are not open for new concepts regarding the licensing of your project.
>BSD has lost a lot by giving the right to re-license in the hand of
>unacquainted people. If just Apple needed to pay for re-licensing the
>BSD project had a huge sponsor. Just think of how far BSD could already
>be progressed if you and other core developers would not have given up
>their right to re-license.

Given that Apple does contribute back to the BSD community (the most
recent and significant is LLVM and Clang which is included in FreeBSD),
open sourced Darwin and the fact that Apple already owned their own
userland from BSD 4.3 a more restrictive FreeBSD license would simply have
resulted in Apple updating their own 4.3 based code over incorporating
aspects of FreeBSD.

NextSTEP v1.0 1989
FreeBSD v1.0 1993

There is probably more mild animosity between BSD folks and GPL folks over
licensing than anything related to Apple.  Well, other than maybe stealing
Jordan Hubbard.

Folks don't use BSD (or other permissive licenses) with the desire to
twist people's arms into sharing/paying and don't consider it a pity when
they don't. It's not a bug and it doesn't need fixing.

And given that many permissive licensed projects like PostgreSQL, SQLite,
FreeBSD, Apache etc get significant corporate contributions (code or $) it
turns out that you don't have to twist people's arms and we've known that
for decades.




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