BSD folks position on GPL, Novell, IBM, SCO, and MS...

[[LoN]Kamikaze]

Mike Hauber wrote:
> i am by no means trolling here.  I just haven't heard much of anything from 
> the BSD community on the subjects, and would like to know the general 
> consensus.  Being that this is more of a support mailing list, if one could 
> direct me to where I can ask this question appropriately, or if folks would 
> reply only to my email addy, that would be fine, too.  Impositions here are 
> not my intent.
> 
> I have been an avid user of the BSDs (mostly FreeBSD and OpenBSD), and have 
> experimented with the Linuses for a good while now (Mainly Debian, RH, and 
> SuSe).  I pretty much get it that the BSD folks and the Linux folks don't see 
> eye-to-eye on licensing issues, but it seems to me that the overall attempt 
> of both communities seems to be "get the code out there and keep it free."

This is where you are wrong. The BSD approach is "get free code out there", while the GPL approach is "get open code out there and keep it open" (open != free). You can argue about the meanings of the words free and open, but those are the two approaches.

I think the FreeBSD approach (this is the way I see it) is to use whatever is free to be used. Licensing issue only bother us, where they threaten the BSD license (i.e. GPL Kernel modules where the headers are also GPL code, would enforce the GPL upon the whole Kernel).