If you haven’t been living under a rock the past decade (I suppose Stonehenge qualifies) you may have walked in on some incarnation of the famous GPL vs BSD flamewar. It’s up there with the most famous flamewars (now *there’s* a research question for a brimming sociology student!) of our beloved Internet society.
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sepreece
16 years 43 weeks 2 days 6 hours ago
Mildly useful
This note gives a reasonably unbiased comparison of the GPL and BSD. It's not a bad introduction if you haven't thought about the licenses much before.
I thought it considered the GPL a little more narrowly than it should - it really talks about it only in terms of its tit-for-tat nature, without considering the full breadth of its restrictions (patent issues, form-of-source-distribution issues, and anti-tivoization issues) and without really recognizing the GPL's focus on users' rights as opposed to developers' rights.
It also never really couches the question in terms of personal choice - "How much freedom am I prepared to give away in releasing my code?"