On Monday 13 November 2006 11:21, Alan Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
> > Is a non-free version a big issue for you?  I've always been a big fan 
> > of perl's dual-license approach which effectively removes the 
> > restrictions of the GPL while allowing it to co-exist with GPL'd 
> > components.  I think it's been a good thing for everyone.
> 
> My only concern would be any form of license which allows a vendor to 
> ship Bacula as a closed-source proprietary product without Kern's 
> permission and without paying him royalties.

What I like about the agreement with FSFE is that it covers to a large extent 
this point. As it stands today, I'm not really much in a position to defend 
my copyright from a financial point of view, from a legal point of view, or 
from a point of view of motivation (i.e. enduring the agravation of a 
lawsuit).  The agreement with FSFE really covers this quite nicely as they 
have every interest to defend Free Source, they have the legal expertise, and 
they (as indicated in their recent announcement) have a close working 
relationship with Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org.

Unless I am mistaken, what I give up for this extra protection is the ability 
to sign a closed-source proprietary deal and collect royalties, though I'm 
not 100% sure that I could not do so under the rights they give me in signing 
the agreement.  In any case, that is not really very important because I have 
always said from the beginning of the project that I was not doing this 
project to make money.  What motivates me a lot for this is the realization 
that creating any Bacula structure that was capable of holding the copright 
would take a significant amount of time (at least 6 months) and energy.  

See:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2006q4/000159.html

for more details of the FSFE and gpl-violations.org relationship.

> 
> This (to me) is the fundamental flaw of BSD-style licenses.(*)

Yes, I agree, and though theoretically FSFE could convert Bacula to a BSD 
license, I think that is about as probable as a metorite striking earth and 
destroying all life on the planet.

> 
> The superiority of GPL-license community developed products over 
> BSD-license ones is well illustrated by the shenanigans that several 
> vendors (especially Broadcom!) have gotten up to in order to disguise 
> GPL-cored products (particularly embedded systems using the Busybox 
> package - see www.gpl-violations.org) and claim them as proprietary.
> 
> (*) That doesn't mean I think that GPLv3 is OK.

Thanks for your comments.  

Kern

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