2 Comments
Recently I was looking around for a piece of software and I thought to myself “I need something with a more liberal license than the GPL”.. Then I thought “Wait, is liberal the right word there? Hrm”…
So what do you guys think?
This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted by Jeff Schroeder on April 11th, 2008 at 4:13 pm:
Now are you referring to to traditional “4 clause” BSD license or a more relaxed 3 clause BSD license? There is a big difference between the two. The original BSD license has a mandatory requirement for attribution of copyright.
Read this and the two paragraphs below for a very good explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clause
The original 4 clause BSD license is not gpl compatible because the gpl has no attribution requirement. (Ironic huh?).
If you want a truly liberal license, the MIT license is more liberal than the BSD license. It allows you to do even more and is basicly public domain. The “Simplified BSD License” is pretty much the same as the MIT license.
With all of that being said, the 3 clause BSD or MIT style license are both great choices.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
Posted by Chad Sellers on April 11th, 2008 at 3:31 pm:
According to my dictionary here, the first definition of liberal is “open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.” As the BSD license if more open to different opinions than the GPL (which forces its users to comply with its own opinions), I’d say the BSD license is more liberal than the GPL.