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I have been watching the evolution of the Ubuntu Software Center for quite a while now. I had doubts about its interface and its speed, but I liked the fact that it offered an easy, down-to-earth interface that allowed users to install software easily. However, I have to say that the way the Ubuntu Software Center has evolved is worrying me -- a lot. I am not against the idea of selling software. What I am against, is confusing proprietary software with non-proprietary software, The Ubuntu Software Center seems to be doing just that.
[ Editor's Note: The submission appears to have come directly from the author of the original article. ]
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Ubuntu Software Center is Mixing Proprietary and Free Software in a Dangerous Way
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful
than the sun."
"Why?", he was asked.
"Because at night we need the light more."
(Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday June 08 2015, @07:31AM
No.
You can take a piece of MIT/BSD software, use it in your project, and GPL the combination -- for that matter, you could even decide to go closed source with the MIT/BSD stuff you cribbed, all you have to do is indicate that you used some BSD/MIT code, acknowledge who you got it from, and reference the license (you could even just close source MIT/BSD software, make no changes, and sell it, though that seems sort of pointless).
However, you can't go the other way and relicense GPL software under an MIT/BSD style license, because the MIT/BSD licenses allow you to do things with the software (e.g. make it proprietary closed source) that the GPL forbids. If you could do this with GPL software, it would provide a mechanism to defeat the entire purpose of the GPL, which is to prevent publicly released software based on other GPL software from being made secret.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday June 08 2015, @06:39PM
because the MIT/BSD licenses allow you to do things with the software (e.g. make it proprietary closed source) that the GPL forbids.
Technical point, the GPL doesn't forbid anything. Neither does the BSD or MIT licenses. They simply allow differing amounts of stuff.