On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 03:38:13AM +0530, debian developer wrote: > 1. BSD license is completely free. No one needs to give back changes > forcibly(the GPL way), hence this is completely free. > If what i hear is correct, there are companies(Microsoft) which > take BSD code (network stack i hear) and made it proprietary by not > giving back anything. What i don't understand is are we not loosing > anything in this case?? I can understand that there are many more > companies which have used the code(Apple) and given back but there are > also opposite ends...
No, nothing is lost. A way to look at this which I like more and more: people can still do `bad' things with code under the BSD licence, like extend it and not give back their changes. They are free to do so. The BSD licence does not steal your freedom to make ethical choices about code. On the other hand, the GPL makes half of the ethical choice for you: you want to use the code, you have to give back. The only way not to give back is to not use the code (or, well, you can make a bigger ethical choice of using the code and lying about it).
