On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 08:29:52AM +0200, Alexander Burger wrote: > Hi all, > > as this discussion popped up recently and in the past, and will surely > pop up in the future: What do you think if PicoLisp were released under > the BSD license instead of GPL?
I would love it. I could imagine embedding PicoLisp in some applications. > > Ideologically, I prefer the GPL. It guarantees that "freedom" > propagates. But it does this by cutting down on freedom, so it is > schizophrenic. I used to compare the situation with freedom in a > society: A society should not give an individual member so much freedom > that he can make himself a dictator and thus destroy freedom. But this > comparison is wrong. Using free software in a non-free project doesn't > decrease its freedom; it just doesn't increase it the way the GPL tries > to enforce. So is this just much ado about nothing? Even the FSF argues for less restrictive licenses than the GPL in some situations. For example the GLIBC has a less restrictive license, and they have the LGPL for purposes like this. They argue, that when adoption otherwise is unlikely, you should use the LGPL. This is the case, when there is a large body of proprietary code out there, such as when the GLIBC was created. If it had not allowed anything but GPL programs linked to it, nobody would have used. So it could be argued that you are helping distributing state-of-the-art embeddeble open source lisp by going to a less restrictive license. Of course, the FSF would be less happy if you went with MIT/X11/BSD than with the LGPL, but it is up to you. And the X11 license or 2-clause BSD is the most commercial friendly. best regards, Jakob -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picol...@software-lab.de?subject=unsubscribe
