On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 10:39:26AM +0200, Svetoslav P. Chukov wrote:

> I would like to ask a simple question. I am worried about the M$ and
> Novell parthership ... so I would like to ask how secure is BSD license.
> What about NetBSD? How secure is NetBSD against such license issues like
> M$-Novell statement?

Code which is under a specific license like GPL can be used by
companies as long as they respect the terms of the license agreement.
This is also the same for the BSD license itself.

It is possible to take some code, and if all developers do agree,
change the license for example for a proprietary license. This
is not an easy task because you must have the written of every
developer or remove any of their code and rewrite those parts if
you don't get their agreement.

Even if this happens, the version from which they could create
a proprietary one is still there. If someone takes BSD code and
builds something proprietary, the free version (free as libre,
not free as free beer only) will follow its own path.

> What about if any "invader" want to acquire NetBSD?

There is no "invader" whatsoever. If a BSD project has very good
code, the more people that uses it, the better. If we today
have an Internet with TCP and IP it's because (not only though)
that the best TCP/IP stack implementation (namely, Berkeley's)
was available for everyone at an area where each vendor did
push its proprietary hardware, and proprietary protocols for
network that made inter-communication difficult.

Now, GPL and BSD are two different licenses and like Emmanuel
Dreyfus explained several times, they do are complementary.

BSD license allows to distribute code which we want to be
used as much as possible. Everything related to network protocols
comes to mind, be it TCP/IP or the IPv6 code (Kame, Inria, etc)
and GPL can be used by developers that want to give the open
source world some competitive advantage but that's a whole
different matter and I am more inclined to the BSD license,
and not found of discussing about GPL all day long.

I advise you to go check Eric S. Raymond writings, Larry Rosen,
the fine http://www.groklaw.net/ and Lawrence Lessig especially
who does write interesting stuff and knows what he's talking
about (being a lawyer). Check what creative commons is for
example.

Do not base yourself on discussions on public mailing-lists
especially if people give you strong views about how things
should be or must be. Lawyers, initiatives to promote share
of knowledge within or around libre operating systems are
far more interesting and far reaching.

You have some homework to do now ;)

-- 
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