> At Slashdot there is an interesting discussion going on about GPL and > BSD style of licensing os software. In particular i found this article > insightful: http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155207&cid=13011294 > > I've never seen it that way. GPL gives the author great power and in > contrast to my ancient believe, the possibility to make money of his > work, because people "don't" want to gpl their derivative stuff. > > Do you know there any hidden reason for an author, not to use GPL?
Not which I know. A GPL license give rights to the User of the software only, it says shortly "you can use this software for free as long as your software is GPL". It doesn't remove any right of the author(s) so they're open to relicense it and then sell the code under another license to a company. Few years ago I did GPL paid development : the company wanted to have GPL software so users can use and extend it but they wanted to keep the "basic" version with unrestricted licensing to include in their products. That's why IMHO GPL is a good compromise if you want at the same time to write great software and share it with community and preserve your rights to live from the software you're writing. That doesn't means as the slashdot post author says that people using BSD license are stupid, it's just that they have different goals. Nicolas _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
