On Saturday 02 February 2002 20:18, Jacob Meuser wrote: <snip> [lot's of good commentary on Linux vs BSD development]
That's a pretty sweet analysis. It definitely took me up short. Social dynamics may very well account for much of what is often attributed solely to the power of the license chosen for a project. With the L/GPL, RMS created two valuable tools for controlling publicly released work. He filled a gap in the spectrum of license choice and turned copyright on its ear. But, it's good to be reminded that it is important to know what it is you want to give when making your work available to others. Blindly choosing a license may not let your work do what you really hoped it would accomplish. (Is that vague enough or what?) Cool. Do I have the following right? (Other than my way oversimplification of the GPL and LGPL.) Public Domain - It belongs to everyone and you don't care if anyone ever knows who you were. X11/BSD - Credit where credit is due, but otherwise go for it. Anyone can further restrict the license on something they release or use it to start something new, but the original is always available. LGPL - Anyone can use it however they like, but if they release code (binary or source) that uses it, they must make the source for the LGPL'd code available. And, if the released code (binary or source) required changes to the LGPL code, they must make those changes public. GPL - If you make binaries available, you must provide the source, including any changes you may have made to that source. If you release something based on it, your source needs to be GPL'd as well. Ghostscript - You can see the source as soon as it's released, but you can't release anything based on it until the next full point release is available. At that time the older source is treated as GPL'd. (Patches to fix bugs, submitted to the original authors, is welcome.) QPL - You can see the source and work on changes. You can release patches to the source, but you can not distribute the source with those patches already applied. If you send your patches to the original author, they may be considered for inclusion in a future release. Closed Community Source - Everyone who has paid for the source can share changes with everyone else who has paid for the source, but no one else. Reference Source - Product source is included, but it's just between you and the original author. MS Shared Source - You can look at it, but you can't change it. And, even if you could change it, it wouldn't compile properly. Please let MS know about any bug fixes you may have, even if you can't test them. And, oh BTW, remember, just the fact that you could have looked at the source means MS may have rights to any future code you write that is at all similar. Closed Source - You've got what you've got, if we don't ever make a new release, that's it.
