Well, it's my understanding that the OpenBSD folk want to have as many
people using their code as possible, so they need as-free-as-possible
code. Copyleft locks down certain commercial uses of it, so it doesn't
support that goal; it's more than mere handwaving to them, it's part of
their philosophy and goals. The GNU people, naturally, have very
different goals.
That said, I am not one of the OpenBSD inner circle. I did invite Theo
to comment on this thread, however, and I hope that he will do so at
some point.
---Brendan O'Connor
Shawn Walker wrote:
On 12/06/07, Dev Mazumdar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Shawn Walker wrote:
> On 12/06/07, Brendan O'Connor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> It doesn't appear that OpenBSD's problem is political in nature.
>>
>> http://openbsd.org/policy.html
>>
>> The important section to this discussion would be the one on the
GPL and
>> copyleft; they don't like it. They would be willing to consider it for
>> non-core things as long as it's separable-- so that OpenBSD itself can
>> be put into commercial products without source release.
>>
>> The CDDL, while it's GPL-incompatible, still includes some copyleft
>> which would seem to make it subject to this same restriction in
OpenBSD.
>> Of course, the way to get a definitive answer on that would be to ask
>> their founder; I know that Theo ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) has always been
>> willing to share his beliefs on licensing.
>
> They seem to treat all copyleft licenses as one requiring all works be
> distributed under them, meaning, they don't seem to fairly or
> accurately represent other copyleft licenses such as MPL, CDDL, etc.
>
> As you said, someone just needs to ask Theo.
>
Bottom line is that we will announce Open Sound under CDDL to the BSD
communities. If they want to come to the table to negotiate a different
license, we're open to it but what is NOT negotiable is the freedom to
take the standard implementation and go off and modify the API. We also
want to prevent the non-open source POSIX operating systems (you know
who you are) from taking the BSD code and deriving benefit.
For non-opensource people - we have the 4Front proprietary license ;-)
I wholeheartedly support this approach. A copyleft license of some
form is absolutely necessary if your goals are to keep modifications
to the standard base open.
So far, I haven't seen any reasons why *BSD distributions can't use
CDDL'd code other than personal preference or handwaving.
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