If Gimp were licensed under BSD and Photoshop were unfree, then Photoshop could take code from Gimp without telling anyone and Gimp would never be able to profit from the improvements.

And the LGPL exists for simple strategic reasons: Make people reliant on free software – and make sure that the parts they rely on stay free. If the TCP/IP had been licensed under LGPL, Microsoft could have taken it, and we would have gotten their improvements.

In my opinion, a BSD license is only useful for free software, if you want to get an already finished technique into the programming community. It allows the biggest spread of your already done work.

On the other hand, the GPL gets more people to work on improving the code instead of reinventing the wheel all the time (because someone else did it under an unfree license).

Consider why Google released webm/vp8 under an almost BSD-style license. They wanted it to become a standard. They did not want to prompt developing even better video codecs, but to push mp4 out of the net.

And for that, the codec had to get into unfree software, so the choice is quite sound.

For a free software community on the other hand, it is quite detrimental, because you lose momentum of code development: Less overall programmer hours for the code all people can use. The only reason I see, why BSD is working, is that there are many companies who are opposed to free software, but who want to profit from the ongoing work of the BSD folks. So they contribute back to get free maintenance. But that means that free software programmers have to invest more time into maintenance, because the companies have no incentive to help there (otherwise they could just do it inhouse and get an edge over their competition).

Why do all the BSDs offer monolithic platforms while in the GNU/Linux community, coders and distributions are seperate?

“GPL freedom is isomorphic. If OpenOffice needs a way to open jpeg files, and the gimp already has code for this, OpenOffice can just take it. Then two years later if OpenOffice reads jpegs much faster, the gimp can take the modified code from OpenOffice and use it. Both parties have the same degree of freedom, and no freedom is lost along the way, the process is “lossless”.”

The faulty argument here is that it doesn’t correlate to the section about BSD. If OpenOffice and GIMP were under a BSD-license, they could still do this. What motivates software developers to give away code is not some cheesy statement from the FSF or what Stallman thinks is good, but by the commitment from the developers themselves. We see this perfectly in the BSD community where, despite their differences, still manage to contribute to one-another Putting software under the GPL does not give you any advantage of distribution or “community-building” if no one cares about it.

The other problem is that it’s not a fair comparison. Let’s re-visit Microsoft’s use of TCP/IP. Suppose that at the time the TCP/IP stack was instead released under the GPL. What would’ve happened instead is that Microsoft would have developed their own proprietary protocol. In essence, the GPL would have made it a lot worse because the GPL would have indirectly contributed to the creation of more closed-source software. The reason why the GPL is not a good license is that it forbids code from crossing boundaries. It basically states that, “You must release this code under the GPL or you will never use it.”, which means that companies that need to protect their trade secrets can’t use any GPL’d code. In addition, if the GPL was so successful in its ideology, then why bother with the creation of the LGPL?

It sometimes seems as though the Stallmans of the OSS community are more interested in fighting a war against corporations who don’t distribute their source code, instead of creating an environment of true unrestricted freedom that the BSD license creates. That same environment that breeds and drives talented software hackers to work on low level projects like hardware drivers, or to create an operating systems that is almost completely secure out of the box (OpenBSD).

Peace
–Raja_Guy

But as a developer I only release software under GPLv3. I let everyone to use my code freely – the least they can do is to feed back their improvements.

Allowing people and companies to close and resell software by using BSD-like licenses will harm the Open Source community. It gives them an advantage and creates fragmentation.