Posted by: Stephen Samuel
on March 30, 2006 11:46 AM
Nothing prevents the buyers of proprietary products from switching to the sensible BSD one;
A large company with force of market share (e.g. Microsoft) could take your BSD licensed code and make a proprietary and willfully noncompliant version. They could even patent or DMCA the changes they make. At that point someone who has grown up with the proprietary version and learns of the (incompatible) BSD version has two nasty choices -- Stay with the (possibly broken) proprietary version, or go to the BSD version that will break all their existing code and make them incompatible with 90% of the universe.
That kind of problem is why I prefer GPL to BSD licensing.
Anarchy and maximal freedom are not necessarily the same things.
Protecting the greater freedoms sometimes requires carefully designed constraints on lesser freedoms.
For example, protecting my freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might require the restriction of your liberty to pursue the happiness that would result from (threatening to) putting a bullet thru the back of my head. (and vice versa)
The GPL attempts to strike a nice balance between the two freedoms, and many people seem to agree that it does a good job of that.
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Nothing prevents them but impracticality
Posted by: Stephen Samuel on March 30, 2006 11:46 AMA large company with force of market share (e.g. Microsoft) could take your BSD licensed code and make a proprietary and willfully noncompliant version. They could even patent or DMCA the changes they make. At that point someone who has grown up with the proprietary version and learns of the (incompatible) BSD version has two nasty choices -- Stay with the (possibly broken) proprietary version, or go to the BSD version that will break all their existing code and make them incompatible with 90% of the universe.
That kind of problem is why I prefer GPL to BSD licensing.
Anarchy and maximal freedom are not necessarily the same things.
Protecting the greater freedoms sometimes requires carefully designed constraints on lesser freedoms.
For example, protecting my freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might require the restriction of your liberty to pursue the happiness that would result from (threatening to) putting a bullet thru the back of my head. (and vice versa)
The GPL attempts to strike a nice balance between the two freedoms, and many people seem to agree that it does a good job of that.
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