Rant on BSD vs GPL was [Good ol' BSD vs. GPL]

Cathal Garvey cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me
Wed Jan 7 01:48:56 PST 2015


Short answer: Yes, they patent-troll large companies using Linux, and 
many of them roll over rather than get sued into oblivion. Patents and 
profiting from patents is an unrelated discussion to copyright-based 
licensing.

Of course, GPL licenses contain clauses that actually battle software 
patents, whereas more "permissive" licenses do not. So, for example, a 
company shipping GPL'd code makes a covenant in so doing not to sue 
others for patents under some set of broad conditions. Microsoft used 
BSD code way back and was still able to sue the FLOSS community 
regularly, but since buying Nokia, who then shipped an Android phone 
(linux, GPLv2), apparently their basis for doing so in future is 
somewhat undermined.

This is why GPL matters, why it's valuable. A permissively licensed code 
commons is great if we're all great people who write and share great 
things. But there are plenty of people out there willing to Embrace 
Extend Extinguish, which GPL protects against (patent clauses and 
copyleft) and BSD does not.

On 07/01/15 08:52, Georgi Guninski wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 01:21:22PM -0600, Dan White wrote:
>> On 01/06/15 19:51 +0200, Georgi Guninski wrote:
>>> Let me make a rant on BSD vs GPL licenses.
>>>
>>> It is well known fact that Micro$oft used *BSD TCP stack in earlier
>>> versions of their shit. In addition on _old_ versions of windows,
>>> grepping for "Berkeley" returned the bsd license in userland, likely
>>> in the shit called "ftp.exe".
>>>
>>> I am not a coder, though have released some non-destructive stuff.
>>>
>>> If I were a coder, I would have been pissed off if micro$oft
>>> profited from my codeZ$ (though a lot a of sheeple don't care about
>>> this).
>>
>> My googlefu is failing me, but I recall that Microsoft came to some sort of
>> agreement back in the 90s with the Regents of the University of California,
>> meaning someone got payed.
>>
>
> I haven't heard of this, though it might be true.
> They could have done it legally without paying and BSD license in
> their code suggests they might have not paid enough (if any).
> Reference:
> http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2004/06/25/108820958560677845/
> BSD Licensed Code in Windows
> Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
>
>>> If I were a coder, GPL is assumed to guarantee me that shit like m$
>>> can't profit from codeZ$.
>>
>> https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+making+money+from+linux
>>
>
> I agree that m$ profits from linux, but this requires more legal
> tricks/sophistication than just legally taking the BSD code.
> (My guess is they profit mainly from patents, but this is another
> story).
>
>
>
>> --
>> Dan White
>> vi, debian, C, mutt, sysvinit, /usr/local/, su -, and I dress to the right



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