OSI's war on corporate licenses

Chuck Swiger chuck at codefab.com
Tue Apr 12 20:58:19 UTC 2005


Bruce Perens wrote:
[ ... ]
> I believe the meaning is "licenses that grant rights on new
> modifications to the initial developer that are not granted to all of
> the other developers". The right granted is generally an unlimited right
> to relicense, essentially carte blanche to take the product private
> tomorrow including all contributed modifications, or to bring out
> "differentiated" versions of the product offering some functionality in
> addition to that offered in the Open Source version when none of the
> other partners can do that.

Sure.  This is exactly what many Open Source developers want to do.

> The original case was the NPL. Netscape had already entered into
> contracts with other companies that required them to bring out the
> product under a proprietary license.

Complaining that the MPL hasn't been productive enough to suit your tastes is 
hardly called for.  Besides, the original case was the BSD license.

It still has a strong community approximately thirty years after adoption 
circa 1977, and BSD licensed code is a significant or critical component of 
almost every shipping system out there, starting with Microsoft, and including 
MacOS, Linux, Free/Open/NetBSD, and many others.

-- 
-Chuck




More information about the License-discuss mailing list