[Sussex] Ok the gauntlets on the floor!

[Steve Dobson]

John

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 04:36:09PM +0100, John D. wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 17:48, Geoff Teale wrote:
> > One major tenet of the GPL is that it does not exclude any person.  
> > You can come from any faith, country, political view point or 
> > corporation and use GPL programs and code so long as you comply with the 
> > terms of the GPL.  SCO can use the GPL code with the same rights as IBM 
> > or Linus Torvalds.
> 
> So, this is, presumably, why "friend Balmer" refered to linux as
> software cancer/software communism not all that long ago.
> 
> I wondered, because when I first saw reports of it, I automatically
> "pooh poohed" it as more MS based FUD, and couldn't be bothered to read
> any further.

AFAIK the "software communism" is M$ FUD (if not M$ then someone trying
to stop Open/Free Software).  It amazes me that there are still many
Americans that think that communism is akin to devil worship.

As for the "software cancer" our friends over in *BSD land do see the
GPL as a virus.  And they do have a point.  The GPL requires that any
derived work is also GPLed - thus "cancer".

The BSD license places no such restriction on derived works.  You can 
take the BSD source, compile it (changing the name from "BSD" to
"BJOS" [1] but only if you want) and sell it on.  So in this sense the
BSD is more "free" than the GPL.

Steve

[1]
BDOS: Big John's Operating System