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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD Date: 7 Dec 1995 10:26:32 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 51 Message-ID: <4a6fgo$6lg@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <DJ3DM7.n0L@kroete2.freinet.de> <4a1s2i$4l9@zuul.nmti.com> <DJ6y7H.MIE@kroete2.freinet.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:30520 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10584 comp.unix.advocacy:12253 comp.unix.misc:20127 In article <DJ6y7H.MIE@kroete2.freinet.de>, Erik Corry <erik@kroete2.freinet.de> wrote: >I'm basing this on a post I have unfortunately lost from Russel >Nelson (I think. Or was it Alan Cox? I may be getting them mixed >up because of the Welsh connection). He said he had consulted >a lawyer on the subject, who told him that the prohibition >against using certain names in advertising in the BSD license >counts as an additional restriction in the sense of the GPL, >and hence they conflict. That is utterly absurd. The BSD copyright claims that you can't use the name of UCB or the Regents in advertising. That is, you can't put "FooBSD - the official operating system of the University of California, Berkeley!" all over your CD cover. This is an "encumbrance?" I can't put "Official Operating System of the U.S. Olympic Team" on the cover either, but that hardly constitutes a hardship. I'm sorry, but this is the most specious argument I've heard in a long time. The BSD copyright is about as close to "public domain" as you can get. Acknowledge the contributors and you can do whatever the heck else you like. The GPL puts a whole raft of extra restrictions on how the software must be distributed or changed, and that is why we're less than willing to use it for our kernels - the question of distributing source for binaries (especially if you're producing some product like "router on a floppy") just gets too complex. Also, just for the record, we HAVE done kernels that had GPL'd code in them. This is not a religious issue, despite frequent visits to that side of the debating fence, this is an issue of trying to keep the "cost" of doing commercial versions as low as possible. Sometimes we've felt that the benefit of some bit of code offset this cost enough that we put GPL stuff in the kernel for a time (until another solution could be found), and we're hardly entirely inflexible about it - we wouldn't even have compiler technology if we were! >compatible, it would probably result in a tendency towards >everything becoming GPLed sooner or later, which might irritate Nope. GPL == greater complexity, not less, and I'd much rather see a migration in the direction of lesser complexity. Less complex wins for me every time! Also, we have no objection whatsoever to our code ending up in a GPL'd product! We just don't chose to use that license ourselves. That distinction IS important, my friend! Jordan