BSD License????

[W. Wayne Liauh]

No, you have to worry about all the various open-source licenses (and 
there are a whole bunch of them), only when you are interested in 
building a commercial entity to re-distribute their code.  Steve Ballmer 
is spreading FUD about open-source licenses, particularly GPL; and it 
appears to be working even among those like yourself whom I consider 
experts in the open-source community.

There are two key elements in GPL and Free/Open BSD: a copyright notice 
and a bold-typed disclaimer of warranty that will free all contributors 
from any potential liability.  (You can provide your own warrenty with 
whatever terms and charge whatever price your buyer is willing to pay.) 
 With GPL'ed code, of course, if you re-distribute the code you also 
have to "offer to provide the source code" at cost.  As we all know, 
most GUN's libraries are under LGPL, and as such, you can include their 
binaries without providing your source code.  


Jimen Ching wrote:

>On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
>
>>This discussion also brings out an interesting issue, that is, it appears to
>>be more difficult to port an open-sourced program into Linux than to port a
>>proprietary one.  With the latter, what you're doing is to reverse-engineer
>>the functions of the code.  Whereas, with an open-sourced program, it will be
>>very difficult to argue that you are not translating (a form of copying) the
>>code to a different form, even though you may be rewriting the entire code.
>>
>
>Yes, these issues are some of the things people are complaining about in
>the free/open source software world.  Of course, these problems only arise
>when you try to combine the source code.  Most projects I know are always
>re-inventing the wheel anyway.  So these issues are kind of moot.  BSD has
>their PF, Linux will get their own in time.  It is unfortunate that the
>license is the major driver of these re-inventions.  But there are more
>than enough engineers to do the work, so why worry?
>
>Even if there are no licenses to drive these duplicate efforts, someone
>will always want to do it anyway.  Look at the number of editors and
>browsers and Wordprocessors and desktop environments.
>
>--jc
>--
>Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org
>
>
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