Re: [HACKERS] Re: Revised Copyright: is this morepalatable?

At 00:24 5/07/00 -0400, Mike Mascari wrote:
>>
>> Am I correct in saying that you agree that the GPL is where we should be,
>> but you want people to go there of their own free will?
>
>Why do you continue to insist that GPL is superior to BSD? GPL is BSD
>*with restrictions*

I don't. The above was a question to Jan.

I have stated in the past that I would prefer PG to be GPL, but that is
based on my perception of PG as a 'strategic resource' for my company. The
GPL Vs. BSD discussion is a religious war that will only be resolved in
time. I do, honestly, hope Jan is right about the convergence of open
source and industry.

The context in which I said I would prefer PG to be GPL was when someone
suggested leaving the BSD licence for a more restrictive (to developers
rights over their submissions) version.


>If someone comes along and sweeps up the
>major developers:
>
>A) Good for the major developers - they deserve to have large
>sums of cash thrown their way, particularly for many of them who
>have been working on this *for years*

I totally agree. This can happen under GPL. If I were a company wanting to
develop PG, the source would be less of an issue than access to the core
developers who are the real resource. As Jan has said elsewhere, keeping
source secret is a waste of effort.


>B) The moment it happens, the project forks and another "Marc"
>out-there offers to host development on his machine and the
>process begins again. PostgreSQL exists despite Illustra's
>existence.

No problem here but wasted effort.


>This is not something new. SunOS, AIX, HPUX, etc. all have (at
>one time or another) considerable BSD roots. And yet FreeBSD
>still exists... All GPL does is 'poison' the pot by prohibiting
>commercial spawns which may leverage the code. If someone makes
>some money selling CommercialGres by integrating replication,
>distributive, and parallel query, good for them.

This is the place where the religious war starts, so I'll confine my
comments to the issue at hand:

In summary of my position:

1. I am happy to continue with vanilla BSD + extra warranty & liability
disclaimers.

2. If the license goes anywhere else, I *believe* it probably should go GPL.

3. If people really want to write yeat another license (as opposed to
warranty), then they should do it properly - look at the objectives, look
at all existing public licenses, find the once closest to what the
developer & user base wants, modify it according to the specific needs.
Perhaps a modified LGPL might be better. Someone (Jan?) noted that adding a
driver is a problem under GPL - perhaps that should be addressed, rather
than just taking away more rights of developers as is proposed by Great
Bridge.




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