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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!soda.berkeley.edu!gwh From: gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: GNU vs. Berkeley Licenses Date: 21 Apr 1993 07:59:24 GMT Organization: Dis- Lines: 27 Sender: gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) Message-ID: <1r2uss$36u@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu Summary: Not Here, Not Now Disagreements about the relative merits of the GNU license and the Berkeley-style license are one of the net's longest standing and least useful hobbies. I don't think there's anyone out there who is going to change their position despite 50+ flaming articles we've seen about it here recently. If you want GNU licenses, then use GNU code. If you Don't, Don't. The people who are creating the 386BSD and NetBSD OS'es feel strongly for the Berkeley style license, and that's not likely to change, but that has no bearing on anything else. The GNU people are not degraded by this decision, and the Berkeley people are not made better. It's just different. The root of the dispute isn't logical, it's philosophical. I trust that both sides are interested in more open programs, etc. I've never met anyone who used _either_ style license that wasn't. Even when some of my code was put under GPL by someone else, I understood that they had good end motives (though I disliked the method). Debating the two systems is valid. Please do it somewhere where it's appropriate. This newsgroup isn't. We have much better things to do here, like create a good, workable, free OS, than babble about the philosophy of freedom. -george william herbert gwh@soda.berkeley.edu gwh@lurnix.com