When I pick out which libraries or applications I want to build for my system, I tend to prefer permissive software licenses like MIT or BSD over more restrictive ones like GPL or Affero GPL. Some examples of programs/libraries with similar function that have more restrictive versus more permissive licenses are: readline versus libedit, tar versus libarchive/bsdtar, ncurses versus pdcurses or bsd-curses There are several other examples. Sometimes when software changes to a more restrictive license, I see people who build the software from source or even distributions keep and continue to patch older versions of the software in order to continue to use the older license terms.
Was just wondering if others on this list used license types (permissive versus restrictive) as a criteria of what software they'd prefer to build and use on their systems. Would also be curious to know if anyone builds older versions of a library or program due to license changes. Does anyone have other favorite more permissive alternatives that they like to use besides the few I mentioned? Thanks. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
