On Tuesday 23 Sep 2008, Sandip Bhattacharya wrote: > [snip] > At the risk of a flame war debating between GPL and BSD licences, > this is exactly the difference between the two licences, IMO of > course. > > * GPL restricts complete freedom, by putting in conditions, for the > higher goal of software freedom for the society. > * BSD (w/o advert. clause) strives for complete freedom. They share > the same goals as GPL - software freedom, but give further freedom to > users - the choice to use whatever licence they want for their > derivatives.
GPL and similar strong copyleft licences actually aim to protect the rights of the users, by ensuring that the users always have options to enhance, modify and adapt the package to their needs. BSD and similar licences aim to protect the rights of the programmers, by ensuring that programmers can do whatever they want with the software, up to the extent of taking freedom away from their users (and even other programmers). In my dictionary GPL enhances complete freedom while BSD restricts it, but that's just a question of which point of view you approach and define complete freedom from. I doubt if there's a one definition fits all solution, and I'd rather explore the relative merits and demerits of a licence with respect to a specific objective than have a black-and-white approach to the question of which is better (or even ask that question). There's a reason both type of licences exist :) Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
