On 04/27/2009 02:30 PM, MARK CALLAGHAN wrote: > I must have missed the discussion of this. Why must new contributions > be BSD rather than GPL? As it is now, Drizzle might not be a Sun > project but only Sun can sell non-GPL licenses to it. I am not against > people monetizing their hard work. But I am curious about why this was > done.
Since I don't know why it was done, I'll offer a bunch of uninformed speculation :) BSD is a very permissive license. If I were mostly concerned about getting as many contributors as possible, and having the code spread as far as possible, used in the most places, I would choose a license like BSD or MIT and would not require copyright assignment. Code that is under BSD can easily be incorporated into a project that uses GPL (MySQL), and also into a project that uses CDDL (Solaris), and also into a project that uses BSD (Postgres). As the copyright owner, Sun could presumably choose to relicense all of the original MySQL code from GPL to BSD. I have zero insight into what the thinking was in choosing BSD, but picking license that is compatible with GPL, CDDL, and just about anything else there is seems very reasonable to me. For example, I've released some library code as BSD when my intent is for it to later become part of the Python standard library. If my goal were to ensure that the software and all future variants stayed free, then I would choose a license like AGPL and require copyright assignment. The FSF has an explanation of why they require copyright assignment[1], so it's not just big corporations who want copyright assignment. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html -- Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~drizzle-discuss More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
