Alan,

It's not an assumption, and you cut out my qualifying statements.  It
absolutely does depend on your goals.  For companies that want to embed
an OS and not disclose their own source code (for whatever reason), the
GPL is absolutely out of the question.

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with the GPL, and I do
understand the protections it gives.  I'm just saying that it's not the
license for everybody, and in the case posited by the author of the
article, it certainly is not.


Mark Post

-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Alan Cox
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 5:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Interesting? to those who are subject to SOX


On Iau, 2006-01-19 at 14:20 -0500, Post, Mark K wrote:
> he's absolutely right.  The BSD style licenses are much more business 
> friendly than the GPL.

Dangerous assumption. BSD licenses can be a lot less business friendly
especially the older one.

I worked for a certain networking appliance company that vetoed the use
of NetBSD because of the credit rules it has - miss anyone out on
anything and you might get sued.

Others favour GPL because it stops someone taking your output and
selling it back to you. Microsoft can't take IBM Linux contributions
improve the and sell them back to IBM as they could with BSD.

Some even use this to build a dual model - mysql, sleepycat etc.

So it depends on your goals.

Alan

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