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posted by martyb on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-the-multiverse-donor dept.

Over at the Meshed Insights blog, Simon Phipps writes about why the public domain falls short and more detailed licensing is needed in order to extend rights to a software community.

Yes, public domain may give you the rights you need. But in an open source project, it's not enough for you to determine you personally have the rights you need. In order to function, every user and contributor of the project needs prior confidence they can use, improve and share the code, regardless of their location or the use to which they put it. That confidence also has to extend to their colleagues, customers and community as well.

Source : The Universal Donor


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:50PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:50PM (#624247)

    If only Stallman could have been satisfied with BSD then there wouldn't have been colossal duplication of effort to reinvent Unix as GNU/Linux.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:59PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:59PM (#624294)

    At the time, BSD Unix was entirely proprietary and closed-source, and likely would have remained so indefinitely were it not for competition from GNU.

    If only people were all benevolent altruists who would instinctively share all their innovations and improvements freely with their users, and those whose shoulders they have stood upon, BSD would have been sufficient.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:13PM (#624304)

      The whole point is that the license doesn't seem to matter.

      The BSDs are largely FOSS now not because of the GPL, but because of a shift in thinking—as the OP said, FOSS is an act of individual will, not legalese.

      BSD became FOSS due to the work of not Stallman, but rather the work of Bill and Lynne Jolitz [wikipedia.org]. And, you know what? Thank goodness for the initial proprietary software; someone had to pay to develop the ideas of Unix in the first place.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:06PM (#624336)

        "The 386BSD port [by Jolitzes] was possible because, partly influenced by Stallman, Berkeley hacker Keith Bostic had begun an effort to clean AT&T proprietary code out of the BSD sources in 1988." -- http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html [faqs.org]

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:04PM (#624298)

    BSD was proprietary when Stallman started his efforts. And it still might be if it wasn't for Stallman and other free software advocates.