What are your feelings on GPL vs. BSD licensing?

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Tsuroerusu
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What are your feelings on GPL vs. BSD licensing?

Post by Tsuroerusu » Mon Feb 20, 2006 2:54 am

I was just wondering what people in here thinks of GPL vs. BSD licensing.

My personal view is that if you write a program to ensure that a standard remain *open forever, and as many people as possible can use that standard and your program I think the BSD license is a good choice, for everything else, I'm all for GPL and LGPL licensing, for example the thing that keeps Linux from fragmenting like UNIX is the GPL, because none can make a proprietary version, and if you must make sources available to the people you redistribute the software to, you can always see what people may do to make their version incompatible with another vendor's version and take that into account.

*) An example of this is Apache, the reason the Apache guys uses a BSD-style license was that their philosophical belief was the importance of open standards and they wanted to make sure that HTTP and HTML remained open standards, which basically prevented Microsoft from "patenting the internet".
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