wxPython Licence vs GPL

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:25:58 +0000, Ed Jensen wrote:

> Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>> Python and *BSD are getting far less volunteer development love than,
>> say, GCC or Linux, and the licensing is at least part of the reason.
> 
> I disagree.  I believe *BSD gets less volunteer development because of
> some legal wrangling in the early 90s that didn't affect Linux.

That was over a decade ago, and the BSD licence was vindicated by the
courts -- why has there been such limited volunteer development, and
practically zero commercial development, for BSD?

The BSDs are about 15 years older than Linux, and the legal wrangling they
went through were no worse than the SCO nonsense going on now. With a 15
year head start, and 10 years since the legal problems, why has BSD never
attracted 1% the commercial interest of Linux?

You can often tell something of a thing by those who oppose it. Microsoft
is perhaps the epitome of the closed-source mentality: on the rare
occasions they release their source code at all, they do so only
grudgingly, never the entire tool chain, at very high cost, and with
exceedingly restrictive conditions. (Yes, I'm aware I'm generalising --
but it is a valid generalisation, one or two minor exceptions doesn't
invalidate the overall picture of Microsoft's desire to keep their source
code locked up tight.)

Microsoft is spending a lot of time and effort trying to fight the GPL,
but have said that BSD licences are acceptable to them. In fact they
*love* BSD licences -- for others, just not for themselves.

And no wonder: Windows only has an TCP/IP stack because they could grab
the BSD source code and use it. Has Microsoft show any gratitude to the
BSDs? Have they returned any code to BSDs, or given money to BSD coders?
In a pig's ear they have.

Microsoft stands for closed source software: they absolutely hate the
GPL. But they like the BSD licence, because it lets them freeload
off the labour of idealistic programmers for free, without so much as a
thank you.



-- 
Steven.