Matthew Dillon on DragonFly 1.10

[allix]

http://kerneltrap.org/node/14116

Its a really interesting interview and his criticisms of the GPL are quite humorous.

JA: How important to you is it that your code is released under the BSD license?

Matthew Dillon: Unbelievably important. I have never subscribed to the almost religious fervor surrounding the GPL, in particular I do not like the idea of trying to impose the concept of freedom on people by attaching strings. The GPL has created a misguided sense of self importance in the open source world.

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It is really unfortunate that the fanatics don't realize this. They hold up few and far-between examples of so-called 'stealing' and the so-called protection that the GPL affords against such 'stealing' without any real understanding of what is actually accomplished. There is very little difference between the concept of 'integration' and the concept of 'stealing' in the open-source world. They are more like shades of grey.

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Using the BSD license is basically saying that one has no serious monetary interest in any of the work derived from that project, and that one has no interest in imposing strings on people who might want to use the work.

[Tsuroerusu]

http://kerneltrap.org/node/14116

Its a really interesting interview and his criticisms of the GPL are quite humorous.

To me it seems like he just doesn't understand the purpose of the GPL.
I don't care how freaking much Linus Torvalds tries to argue that this isn't the case, because the author of the GPL, Mr. Richard Matthew Stallman, has always stated both in the license itself, and in his speeches, that the purpose and goal of the GPL, is to protect, and actively defend what he sees as essential freedoms computer users ought to have (See gnu.org for the definition of these, in case you're like a certain talkshow host and confuses them with freedom of speech or freedom of thought).

[Wally Balljacker]

He can criticize the GPL all he wants, but the bottom line is that it has been a huge success for the F/OSS community in ways the BSD licenses have never been.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think Linux or Open Source in general would have gotten anywhere without the protective nature of the GPL. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, whoever, could have taken whatever they liked for their own proprietary interests. GPL provides a level playing field, preventing the likes of Apple or Microsoft from snatching up the Linux kernel and shafting the community.

[mowestusa]

He can criticize the GPL all he wants, but the bottom line is that it has been a huge success for the F/OSS community in ways the BSD licenses have never been.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think Linux or Open Source in general would have gotten anywhere without the protective nature of the GPL. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, whoever, could have taken whatever they liked for their own proprietary interests. GPL provides a level playing field, preventing the likes of Apple or Microsoft from snatching up the Linux kernel and shafting the community.

The GPL is an amazing license that protects and encourages innovation. In fact, Linus has said that he likes the GPL2 because if someone makes a changes to the kernel he wrote originally and distributes those changes, he can see the changes and decide if he wants to fold those changes into the next release. So his work is protected, and he gets to benefit from the work of others, or at least sees how something should not be done.

The BSD license wouldn't give Linus the changes so that he could look them over. Of course as Stallman has said, if the new kernel changes are not distributed, then even with the GPL Linus would not see those changes.

The BSD license comes from a different history and background. Perhaps it comes out of the history of US government funding, and the need to be able to freely use in whatever way one wanted the code that resulted. Perhaps it comes from the US University atmosphere which drives free use by students and faculty of University property, including intellectual property, but then when breakthroughs happen or discoveries are made the idea and the property is licensed and closed up to provide a profit stream for the university. Most US universities run labs and departments not just to have a place where PHD students have the opportunity to test and gain real world experience in their fields, but also to gain revenue through discoveries and findings that can be sold to large corporations for the development of products and goods. An example that I know of is a Bio-Chem lab on a major university campus that makes discoveries all the time in the area of vitamins. These discoveries can be sold to Pharmaceuticals for big money so drugs can be developed to fight cancer and other diseases. Perhaps with its university background BSD meets a need that is completely different than the need that was met by Stallman and the GPL. BSD gives away its discoveries and allows people to make a profit from building on their base of discoveries without demanding that the code be made public and freely available. This works great for the PHD computer scientist who makes a break through product for the world, but would like to sell his break through for his own personal gain and carrier. Building on the BSD base would allow him to do this, but building on the GPL would not. Perhaps that is why the BSDs continue to be popular with the scientific community today and researchers as well. There must be some reason why the BSDs don't die, but continue to survive with the growth of Linux and GPL software.

I'm curious to know how Troels reconciles this in his mind. I know that he is a defender of the 4 GPL freedoms, probably the biggest defender here in our community. However, he loves OpenBSD, and uses FreeBSD, both of which I'm sure Stallman would never encourage us to use, because the BSDs and their license don't protect the 4 GPL freedoms.

[mowestusa]

(See gnu.org for the definition of these, in case you're like a certain talkshow host and confuses them with freedom of speech or freedom of thought).

Troels, you wouldn't be referring to one of our revered hosts of TLLTS, would you?

[Tsuroerusu]

The GPL is an amazing license that protects and encourages innovation. In fact, Linus has said that he likes the GPL2 because if someone makes a changes to the kernel he wrote originally and distributes those changes, he can see the changes and decide if he wants to fold those changes into the next release. So his work is protected, and he gets to benefit from the work of others, or at least sees how something should not be done.

Just so we're clear, these are beneficial, practical advantages, the main point of the GPL is to protect users' freedom, not to encourage innovation, of course it's is a nice side effect. I believe that it's the freedom aspect which encourages innovation, because people can pretty much try what they want to, sort of like freedom of speech has encouraged many science fiction novels, that would have been deemed a sin against god if it was back in the 1600' when Gallileo discovered Jupiter's four moons.

The BSD license comes from a different history and background.

Very true, to be frank and honest, BSD wasn't started to bring freedom to computer users, Bill Joy started BSD to improve on UNIX, which originally wasn't that great of an OS.

Perhaps it comes out of the history of US government funding, and the need to be able to freely use in whatever way one wanted the code that resulted.

I don't know whether the DARPA funding of BSD back in the 80' influenced the license, but I know that UC Berkeley's lawyers originally thought that it would be a good idea to charge royalties for the BSD code, although the BSD hackers were vocal that it had been developed with the tax payers' money, and Berkeley didn't have the moral right to prevent the public from using the code.

Perhaps it comes from the US University atmosphere which drives free use by students and faculty of University property, including intellectual property, but then when breakthroughs happen or discoveries are made the idea and the property is licensed and closed up to provide a profit stream for the university. Most US universities run labs and departments not just to have a place where PHD students have the opportunity to test and gain real world experience in their fields, but also to gain revenue through discoveries and findings that can be sold to large corporations for the development of products and goods. An example that I know of is a Bio-Chem lab on a major university campus that makes discoveries all the time in the area of vitamins. These discoveries can be sold to Pharmaceuticals for big money so drugs can be developed to fight cancer and other diseases. Perhaps with its university background BSD meets a need that is completely different than the need that was met by Stallman and the GPL.

Well, BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, and Berkeley really means University of California, Berkeley. So absolutely BSD is from a university background. In the beginning it was largely hacked on by students at UC Berkeley. For example a professors might, as an assignment, make a student improve a component.

BSD gives away its discoveries and allows people to make a profit from building on their base of discoveries without demanding that the code be made public and freely available. This works great for the PHD computer scientist who makes a break through product for the world, but would like to sell his break through for his own personal gain and carrier. Building on the BSD base would allow him to do this, but building on the GPL would not.

I'm sorry, but I'm gonna call bullshit on this one!
Saying that the GPL doesn't allow you to make money from software is a bunch of FUD spewed by Microsoft and the likes!
Red Hat has money flowing in, and they sell a GNU/Linux distribution! They also sell support and services around that distribution, however when I go and buy RHEL online, I get a password so that I can download the ISOs, is that not paying for software? Same thing is true for Linspire, in that you pay to be able to download an ISO. Also, in the early days of the FSF, where bandwidth was limited, they sold tapes with GNU software, and they actually still do this today, of course CDs and DVDs are used today. Is that not selling something? I'd say it's even more so than say Microsoft "selling" Windows, because with proprietary software, they're not actually selling you a copy, because you can't do to that copy whatever you like. Proprietary software companies sell you "a license to use" the software, NOT an actual copy. When you get RHEL from Red Hat, you could disassemble the binaries if you wanted, you can rebuild the product etc. etc., but if you redistribute you are bound by the terms of the GPL (Copyright), the actual copy is yours, however if you "make another copy" you are bound by the GPL.

Perhaps that is why the BSDs continue to be popular with the scientific community today and researchers as well. There must be some reason why the BSDs don't die, but continue to survive with the growth of Linux and GPL software.

Well, when you say "BSD", do you mean the actual license, or the operating systems? Because I can extremely easily tell you why FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are still around: IT IS GOOD SOFTWARE!
It's that simple! BSD is great! I use it on about 6 computers etc.
Also, one of the things about free software is that it never dies! As long as there's people using and working on it, it doesn't die. Which is one of the points Mr. Aaron J. Seigo (President of KDE e.V.) has made about KDE 3.5.x.
The license, and similar licenses, have their place in the world. BSD people, generally, seem to have no problems with the idea of non-free, proprietary software, and just want their code to be used (In whatever way), so they "put no strings on it" as Jordan Hubbard (Who is a big name in FreeBSD, and now works at Apple) likes to say.
I personally do have a problem with non-free, proprietary software (Which isn't the same as having a problem with people making money from software. I'd personally love to work for Red Hat! ), which is why I prefer the GPL, and the philosophy around it. I can sort of agree with a few of the BSD people's arguments about the GPL. For example, Linux developers can't take Sun's ZFS code (That are part of OpenSolaris) and port it to Linux, because of license incompatibilities, which, I agree, is somewhat frustrating, because I could really use ZFS right about now! However, having said that, I think that the advantage of assured freedom in the long term, is much more beneficial than some short term, practical advantage.

I'm curious to know how Troels reconciles this in his mind. I know that he is a defender of the 4 GPL freedoms, probably the biggest defender here in our community.

It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it!
As much as that's a little bit a joke, it's also very true in some respect! We all enjoy the freedoms of free software today, because of what people like Richard Stallman fought for in the past. Some day in the future, Richard Stallman, and people like him, won't be here anymore, and I seriously doubt that a true "replacement" could ever be found. That makes it just that much more important, that we continue what Richard Stallman started in 1983, and make sure we bring free software into the future.

However, he loves OpenBSD, and uses FreeBSD, both of which I'm sure Stallman would never encourage us to use, because the BSDs and their license don't protect the 4 GPL freedoms.

Before I answer the question, I'd just like to correct you on something. The four freedoms that you refer to, are not "the four GPL freedoms", it's just "the four freedoms". This is a lot more relavant than you'd think at first glance, because any license that qualifies as a free software license, gives you those four freedoms. To quickly summarize, going by the FSF's definition, the four freedoms are:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).

The GPL, LGPL and AGPL all give you those four freedoms, as well as all the BSD licenses, the X11 license, heck even Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) gives you the four freedoms!
Some licenses are meant as a way of guaranteeing users these freedoms, in the case of the GPL, and some licenses are meant as simply a way of just saying "Use this for whatever you want to, just don't claim you wrote it, don't blame me if hoses your system and leave the copyright notice intact", which is the case of the BSD license. The first Apache license goes a little further by saying "Use this for whatever you want to, just don't claim you wrote it, don't blame me if it hoses your system, leave the copyright notice intact and give me attribution", the Apache 2.0 license also says something about patents etc.

One thing that people don't seem to realize about Richard Stallman, is that he's in fact more pragmatic than you'd think. He's not "pragmatic" in the sense that he'd compromise on his own personal ethics, ideals and goals, but he's very pragmatic in how to adhere to those ethics, and realize his ideals and goals.
For example, back in 2001, he suggested using "a lax license", as he put it, for OGG Vorbis. You can see for yourself, and find out why, right here: http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3.
Another example is his personal website, stallman.org, which for a long time ran on a FreeBSD server. Look at this: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/ ... _site.html.
His preference for a version of the GNU system, is no less understandable than our preference for GNU/Linux over say Windows, GNU is the system that he bloody started! Dang it!
Familiarity is a huge element of anything in life!

OK, back to your original question of my usage of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The answer is really quite simple. Both systems give me, the user, the four freedoms, except for a few binary blobs (proprietary drivers) in FreeBSD, which I always make sure to remove, and the proprietary WiFi firmware included with both OSes. Proprietary firmware is less of an issue for me, since it doesn't taint the inherent privacy that I get from free software. Having said that however, I do try hard to avoid it whenever possible. For example, I use an Asus SpaceLink WL-107g wireless card in my laptop. This card uses the RT2500 chipset by Ralink. It has fully free drivers, requires no proprietary firmware and when the OpenBSD developers asked Ralink for hardware specs, Ralink gave it to them without any sorts of NDA! The only disadvantage to using this card, is that the antenna is not so great. However that's not that important to me.

As long as it's free software, the license itself is not deciding factor, in terms of what I myself use, what's important is that I get the four freedoms. If you asked me to give you a copy of a BSD licensed program, of course I'd give you the source code for it, and not restrict you in any way! Anything less would be unthinkable!! Now if you asked me what license I prefer, and generally would advocate people use, it's the GPL every time, and more recently GPLv3.
OpenBSD is quite close to something that would be listed on gnu.org's list of free operating systems. However, from the FSF's point of view, OpenBSD facilitates distribution of non-free software through the ports system. OpenBSD itself doesn't distribute any non-free software, except for a small amount of wireless firmware. OpenBSD will only include firmware which is freely redistributeable, which is why they don't include Intel's Centrino WiFi firmware, because the license of that firmware is unacceptable to them. Also, they explicitly will never include any binary blob, proprietary drivers, and have been very vocal about this policy. Heck, they even have a song about it: http://openbsd.mirrors.tds.net/pub/Open ... song39.ogg.
However, because of the ports system's ability to install proprietary software, and their inclusion of proprietary firmware (Albeit fully redistributeable firmware), OpenBSD is unacceptable to the FSF, as fully free operating system that they would recommend people use. OpenBSD is a very independant project, they very much stick to their guns in regards to their policies, and they're definitely not gonna change their OS just to please the FSF, I can tell you that for sure.

(See gnu.org for the definition of these, in case you're like a certain talkshow host and confuses them with freedom of speech or freedom of thought).

Troels, you wouldn't be referring to one of our revered hosts of TLLTS, would you?

Jesus Christ man! How could you even think of such a possibility, my god!?!?!? Who in the world do think I am?
(/Sarcasm)

[mowestusa]

Just so we're clear, these are beneficial, practical advantages, the main point of the GPL is to protect users' freedom, not to encourage innovation, of course it's is a nice side effect.

Agreed.

BSD gives away its discoveries and allows people to make a profit from building on their base of discoveries without demanding that the code be made public and freely available. This works great for the PHD computer scientist who makes a break through product for the world, but would like to sell his break through for his own personal gain and carrier. Building on the BSD base would allow him to do this, but building on the GPL would not.

I'm sorry, but I'm gonna call bullshit on this one!
Saying that the GPL doesn't allow you to make money from software is a bunch of FUD spewed by Microsoft and the likes!
Red Hat has money flowing in, and they sell a GNU/Linux distribution! They also sell support and services around that distribution, however when I go and buy RHEL online, I get a password so that I can download the ISOs, is that not paying for software? Same thing is true for Linspire, in that you pay to be able to download an ISO. Also, in the early days of the FSF, where bandwidth was limited, they sold tapes with GNU software, and they actually still do this today, of course CDs and DVDs are used today. Is that not selling something? I'd say it's even more so than say Microsoft "selling" Windows, because with proprietary software, they're not actually selling you a copy, because you can't do to that copy whatever you like. Proprietary software companies sell you "a license to use" the software, NOT an actual copy. When you get RHEL from Red Hat, you could disassemble the binaries if you wanted, you can rebuild the product etc. etc., but if you redistribute you are bound by the terms of the GPL (Copyright), the actual copy is yours, however if you "make another copy" you are bound by the GPL.

I knew I should have made an edit before you responded to this point. What I meant to say, it not that BSD allows you to make money, and GPL does not. I wanted to say that BSD allows you to make money using the Microsoft sales' model of selling closed source code, without allowing people to get a free copy that they could compile themselves or allowing others to use your code that you have written on top of the BSD base.

I agree that you can make money by selling GPL software. Finally, people are willing to pay for nicely pressed CD's, and they are willing to pay Red Hat, Novell, and others for the way in which they package everything together as a final Distro as well. Of course some of those who make money from selling their distors also include things in their distro that are not purely GPL like Linspire and codecs and DVD playback at least for us in the US. The big difference is that I can use OpenSuse, and Fedora, and CentOS. Somone could come along and use BSD as a base, and sell an operating system too, but never offer a way to compile the whole operating system from source and have an identical OS like Red Hat and CentOS. I guess that is where Apple makes some of their buck.

Well, when you say "BSD", do you mean the actual license, or the operating systems? Because I can extremely easily tell you why FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are still around: IT IS GOOD SOFTWARE!
It's that simple! BSD is great! I use it on about 6 computers etc.

I hoping to have BSD on three by the end of next week. I have NetBSD on an old 166mhz laptop with 32megs. Using it only in text mode. I want to install FreeNAS on my new (reassigned) file server. I want to install NetBSD on another 166mhz desktop with 128megs of ram as a personal webserver, shell account, and perhaps a torrent downloader.

[snarkout]

Yet another thread I'm going to have to file away as TL:DR. Looks like a good discussion, though.

I agree with wally that the GPL has indeed made a huge difference in the FOSS world.