Viral permissiveness

Chuck Swiger chuck at codefab.com
Tue Jan 20 22:14:37 UTC 2009


On Jan 20, 2009, at 11:13 AM, Ben Tilly wrote:
[ ... ]
> Suppose you have a project under this license and wish to borrow  
> some BSD code, which you
> then make changes in.   Guess what?  If you license your changes under
> your license, then the original BSD project can't accept them back
> without being forced to change their license!

GPL-miscibility (or the lack thereof) isn't a stumbling block which  
would affect the adoption of such code into a BSD project.  The main  
BSD flavors: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc will readily accept 4- 
clause BSD code, as well as Apache, ISC, MIT, Zlib/PNG licenses...but  
the 2-clause BSD seems to be generally preferred.

They'll also accept GPL'ed code if it works better than alternatives  
under a permissive license, at least into userland and optional/not- 
built-by-default kernel modules.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck




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