Friday, July 08, 2005

BSD License vs GNU GPL

The classic battle rages on. If you are an enterprise, you are probably better protected by the GPL. If you are an enterprising individual who loves to code just for the sake of coding, BSD is for you.

In the real commercial world, it happens differently:

In the GPL customers will not face licensing lock-in. In BSD, there is a threat of having a licensing lock-in.

If Organization X needs to share closed-source, internally developed software with a partner, Org X can choose to (1) proprietary lock-in license to partner, or (2) open source license to partner.

To distribute through option (1), BSD license can be used, but GPL inputs can never be used because of the Copyleft.
To distribute through option (2), either BSD or GPL can be used.

Both licenses enables open source development and is endorsed by the OSI. Then why use two different licenses if the ultimate goal is to distribute free and open source software? Often, the agenda for using the BSD license is to create a potential license-lock in since this license can be more readily converted to a lock-in license.

Makes sense? GPL = true FOSS. BSD = FOSS->commercial.

As for the ToyBox, I chose a BSD-variant which is the Common Public License for this particular reason, hehehe.

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