Note: this is just my opinion, don't base your understandings of OSS licensing on mine and please point out my errors.
The original BSD license is incompatible with GPL so we couldn't include GPL covered code. The revised BSD license does not have the advertising clause, which eliminates the problem, but is ambiguous (confuses with original BSD), which leads us to X11/MIT which is almost the same thing and pretty OK. IMHO these are a bit too permissive, providing an easy way to let the code be used in closed projects without any retribution, let me make an example. A small company decides to use a component of the project for their embedded platform, for example a fully managed OpenGL implementation , extended it a little to make it more attractive than open version. During a few years the company made some non-standard extensions, the market absorbed the new product easily, but those new extensions were never made public, thus hard to reproduce by the community and other small companies. From the other side making the open technology available for commercial applications makes it possible for such small companies to make a stand in the already locked-in market. A solution would be using a more restrictive license which requires code retribution. MPL with provision in section 13 of the MPL exercised. Which means we allow the code to be used under GPL as well. So if I understand well: if we combine our MPL code with some GPL code, the whole is treated like GPLed, unless you use just part covered by MPL, right? GPL is too complicated to provide linkable interfaces and tends to repel potential commercial contributors (drivers and commercial applications developers). MPL seems a good compromise for undecided folks like myself. I haven't seen LGPL well, thus can't say none on this one. CU, now, I'm going to code a bit, not #OS tho~. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ SharpOS-Developers mailing list SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers