Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!192.207.105.50!prodigy.com!darkstar.prodigy.com!davidsen From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux vs whatever Date: 5 Feb 1997 21:04:00 GMT Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY Lines: 45 Message-ID: <5dask0$13q0@usenet1y.prodigy.net> References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <5ciraf$gs@cynic.portal.ca> <32EE0B70.1657@ml.com> <5claa2$jq1@cynic.portal.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: darkstar.prodigy.com Originator: davidsen@darkstar.prodigy.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:156049 comp.os.linux.networking:67209 comp.os.linux.setup:95390 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5859 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2227 comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy:51837 comp.os.os2.advocacy:265535 In article <5claa2$jq1@cynic.portal.ca>, Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.portal.ca> wrote: | It may be reasonable in some people's minds to say that if you take | a one thousand line GPL'd program and make fifty lines of changes, | you must give away those changes. But I should think hardly anyone | would think it reasonable to say that if you integrate five hundred | lines of GPL'd source into a ten thousand line program you wrote | yourself, you must now give away those ten thousand lines of code | you wrote. Yet that's exactly what the GPL says. So don't use it. And bear in mind the libraries are covered by another license (finally). | | The GPL is very un-free because the licence insists on glomming | itself not only onto the source it came with, but any other source | it's assocaited with; it's basically a sort of source code virus. If you don't like it, don't use it. | > Anyone is free to reimplement it as a non-GPLed piece | > of code, should they be perverse enough to want to try. | | As a matter of fact, that has been done. In NetBSD we now have a | non-GPL'd zlib, and we're writing front ends for it so we can get | rid of gzip and gunzip and the like. That really sounds dumb. GPL doesn't say you have to give away the operating system if you include gzip, why would you write another program to do the same thing? | | It should say something to you about the GPL when several major | free software projects (including all the BSDs) are working so hard | to expunge GPL'd source out of their systems. I personally think it means a few people have taken dislike for RMS to a new high. If you want to include GPL code in a commercial project, or to use a bit of GPL code in your non-GPL software and not let people use it freely. If you have gzip as part of the distribution the GPL only affects gzip. Getting it out of a distribution is a political statement, not a practical necessity. -- -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) "As a software development model, Anarchy does not scale well." -Dave Welch