erland;538547 Wrote:
> Do you think there was a reason why Logitech selected to use BSD for the
> player software instead of the GPL license as they've always used on the
> server ?
No clue: for the owner, I think GPL is better (it means no one can take
the code, make it work on their own hardware and run off, giving nothing
in return). My guess is actually that they're being more generous for
whatever reason.
>
> I'm not really against GPL but I can understand why some
> people/companies tries to avoid it and I've also seen people that use
> GPL because they think it's more free than any other open source
> license.
I think the license doesn't really matter to the owner of the code:
Logitech can take their code and fork off a closed version. (Perhaps
somewhat tricky due to some major 3rd party contributors like kdf's
code that's in the core server... don't know if they require ownership
assignment or not.)
So from a corporate point of view, the choice between GPL and BSD
really does favor GPL... it makes it in some sense "less free" in that
-others- can't fork off a server and make it proprietary. (Stallman
would argue that it makes it "more free" because it guarantees that
derivatives would be free as well... and there is a point there.)
Now, there may be some concern over the linking: "we would LOVE to use
this library for our stuff, but we can't link it to our product". Ie,
they would choose BSD over GPL not to protect their own code, but to
allow linking to non-BSD/GPL libraries. (As I recall, it's okay to
have GPL link to BSD, or have BSD link to proprietary... but GPL can't
link to proprietary.)
But, I'm not a lawyer and it all starts hurting my brain since 'intent'
doesn't really matter in law at all.... the intent of even the original
Jive license stuff wasn't to make it impossible to look at without
tainting any trivial modifications... but that was the end result and
hence a big push for the license changes.
("Oh, you looked at our screensaver to write your own? Well now you
can't distribute your own!")
--
snarlydwarf
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