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Timothy Miller wrote:
> 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.
>

I see the MIT/BSD license as being detrimental to the whole concept
of OGP & Traversal. It lets a company (e.g. M$, ATI, NVidea) wait till
we've done the
work & use their money to market Traversal out & close them down. Then
drop
the product for their own. leaving us no better off than we were
before (Because
there'll be no-one left to build boards).

GPL'ed software on the other hand has all the good parts & none of the
bad.

(A bit of  along stretch for an analogy, but I can't see that the
openssl authors get anything back from F5 using their code to bring in
sales of SSL offload devices. But that's the software they use). (BTW,
F5 dropped their BSD kernel in favour of Linux for v9 of their
software, so BSD isn't that appealing to companies, even when they
have a choice). (Then again, maybe they do pay, but did M$ ever pay
for their TCP/IP stack in windows? That was BSD IIRC).

Sorry. I just think releasing as BSD would be detrimental to
everything we're trying to do here.


> 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.
>

You get that with GPL'ed software too though.

> 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.
Same. If only because it meant I could watch DVD's on my laptop.

H.
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