On 7/28/06, James Richard Tyrer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This, unfortunately, leads to the unresolved problem of how to combine BSD and GPL software. I have never understood this. It has always appeared to me that if you combined BSD with GPL that you would have GPL software that had to carry the copyright notice for the BSD software.
The MIT license is very similar to BSD. I'm not familiar with the differences, but both allow the code to be privatized. The reason I suggest BSD/MIT licenses for OGP-related software is so that companies CAN hoard the software. It's of little use to them for any purpose other than to support our hardware, which is the most important thing to us. This way, if legal issues disallow a Windows or MacOS driver from being completely open-sourced, there is no problem, because you can close up this source code at will. The two primary reason for having any sort of license for our code are (a) to limit our liability with regard to what they do with the code, and (b) to make sure they know their rights and freedoms in using the code. With no license, some people might unfortunately NOT use it when in fact they can, just out of fear of legal retribution. I also like the copyright notice for BSD and MIT licenses, so that people get credit for their contributions. Abstractly speaking, I look at our driver code as part of the documentation that tells people how to support our hardware. The fact that you can copy/paste/compile it is just bonus. I'm one of those people who sees source code as a perfectly valid form of free expression that should be constitutionally protected. While I'm too chicken to buck the system and challenge the DMCA by violating it directly (I'd rather challenge it in court or via alternative technology), I was very happy to see DeCSS T-shirts with bits of source code on them. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
