[Volker76]

I'm finding hard to relate anything you said there to what I said. I was counting who has the most constraints and strings attached to their licenses and you are talking about what?

and I told you that the 'restrictions' of the GPL are actually its strength, because it preserves freedom and rewards people who work together, while the mit/bsd licence rewards selfishness, does nothing to preserve freedom and punishes everybody stupid enough to invest money or man power.

With Linux even AMD, Intel, IBM and Nvidia can work together, being sure that none of the others will take the code and make a closed product out of it. Under a bsd style licence running away and closing off is the norm.

And that is why BSD is the worst possible choice.

---------- Post added 05-04-15 at 11:21 ----------

The corporate world does not like to be forced into giving out their source code. If you create and distribute derivative work from GPL licensed code, you have to make your modifications available to the public. There is a way around having to not give out the text to that source code but a binary instead if I recall correctly but means following a bunch of rules on how you compile an link your code. With a BSD license you don't have to worry about any of that at all.

Here, I suspect, is what Volker76 probably had on his mind. The ideology of freedom vs the pragmatic view of it. The pragmatic view is the fewer the constraints the more free it is. The ideological view uses constraints to force a level of freedom whether you want it or not.

the reality is: the less constraints the more selfish the less free, the less development.

Did FreeBSD had any advantages from Apple taking their code? Nope, not a single one.
But Linux is profiteering from Google using it as the basis for Android every single day.

[tuco]

and I told you that the 'restrictions' of the GPL are actually its strength, because it preserves freedom and rewards people who work together, while the mit/bsd licence rewards selfishness, does nothing to preserve freedom and punishes everybody stupid enough to invest money or man power.

With Linux even AMD, Intel, IBM and Nvidia can work together, being sure that none of the others will take the code and make a closed product out of it. Under a bsd style licence running away and closing off is the norm.

And that is why BSD is the worst possible choice.

---------- Post added 05-04-15 at 11:21 ----------



the reality is: the less constraints the more selfish the less free, the less development.

Did FreeBSD had any advantages from Apple taking their code? Nope, not a single one.
But Linux is profiteering from Google using it as the basis for Android every single day.

I understand all your points. But no matter how you look at it, the GPL is viral and it does not allow the maximum freedom because it has constraints. And since we view freedom differently, we can argue until the cows come home and never reach a consensus.

I installed and used Linux for the first time in around 1994 and actually used it for a desktop for a number of years. And at work I use to administer a Red Hat Enterprise Server and wrote in-house software. The lawyers always had to review things and didn't like the GPL at all. I'd tell them lets use BSD instead but big corporations don't like free things like that either. They want to buy it and have both legal recourse and a company backing it for support. At home I like and embed OpenBSD on a compact flash for some Soekris net4801 general communication boxes running my firewall/router and radio to copper bridge. BSD systems are so much cleaner and well organized by comparison.