Subject: Re: BSD license for new code?
To: Luke Mewburn <lukem@NetBSD.org>
From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 08/18/2004 10:15:44
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Luke Mewburn wrote:
> I, myself, have been at the receiving end of an aggressively
> worded demand to change the license terms on code I wrote, with
> scant justification to the rationale let alone the benefits of
> the change. I was not Impressed.
Having seen what Chris Demetriou went through a few years back
trying to figure out the licensing of NetBSD, this kind of thing no
longer surprises me. Let's face it, it's a nightmare trying to ship
a commercial product that includes substantial chunks of NetBSD and
complies with all the licences.
> It turns out that clause 2 is just as, if not more, onerous
> than clause 3, because most products ship with documentation,
> but not all derived products will mention the specific
> functionality obtained from the NetBSD source.
It's not quite as bad, because you can just stash a doc file somewhere
containing all of the license headers, but yeah, it's still a PITA.
> Thus, if I was two remove two clauses from a BSD license
> with the intent to make my code "freer" and "easier to use",
> I'd be considering removing clauses 2 & 3, not clauses 3 & 4.
Having looked at it again, I agree with this.
Then again, I've given up; I now place most of the "free"code I write
into the public domain. I'm told that this may come back to haut me one
day, but whatever....
> d) One method to ease the workload of third parties is to
> build & maintain a "license register" of every source file
> in the system, and provide tools that will display the
> copyright & license conditions for the requested files.
Nightmare, and even just keeping track of what files you took stuff from
is a lot of work.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC