PathScale Gives FreeBSD, NetBSD A New C++ Runtime

[dnebdal]

At first I didn't explain very well what I meant. XorEaxEax did. I meant they prefer supporting closed source projects rather than GPL ones.

Mmh, that does make more sense.
I wouldn't say that they "prefer supporting" it, it's more that a closed project is ... ignorable? It doesn't really bother them, because the only things that will happen are on a scale from "never hear about it again" to "get patches from that company". Compare that to someone making the code GPL, which means that they can see, but not use, everything the other part does to it: When you also know that making it GPL is completely unnecessary, it almost seems like taunting them. Besides, they're probably less likely to get patches from a GPLed fork, since the people involved in that will probably think "oh, it's already open".

So, yeh ... from a BSD point of view, a closed program using some of their code is probably preferable to a GPL project making it GPL-licensed. (Again, this is different from a GPL-ed project using it under the original BSD license, which is a good thing.)

[archibald]

From the Free Software Foundation's licence recommendations:

When you contribute to an existing project, you should usually release your modified versions under the same license as the original work. It's good to cooperate with the project's maintainers, and using a different license for your modifications often makes that cooperation very difficult. You should only do that when there is a strong reason to justify it.

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

[Ex-Cyber]

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

The FSF considers software patents to be a major threat to freedom, so it makes sense that they would not specifically recommend a license that doesn't do anything to address patent issues.

[dnebdal]

From the Free Software Foundation's licence recommendations:

The full text is here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...endations.html. Oddly, it doesn't mention the BSD licence, speaking only of Apache Licence 2.0.

On the other hand:

FreeBSD license

This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed. (It is also sometimes called the “2-clause BSD license”.) It is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the FreeBSD license is a reasonable choice. However, please don't call it a “BSD” or “BSD-style” license, because that is likely to cause confusion which could lead to use of the flawed original BSD license.

(Just for clarity, the old BSD license had an advertising clause - any ads for a product using code with that license had to include a sentence about "includes software written by x". It wasn't GPL compatible, since it was an additional restriction ... and it was somewhat annoying if you had to add a stack of those sentences to every ad.)

And yes, that FSF recommendation makes sense - the only part where people get angry over BSD/GPL interactions is when someone goes against that.

[RealNC]

Funny how BSD people get pissed when people use their code according to the rules of their own license. They don't even know what the heck it is they actually want.

[dnebdal]

Funny how BSD people get pissed when people use their code according to the rules of their own license. They don't even know what the heck it is they actually want.

Can you find an example of that? They're typically not bothered by their code used with the original license in something else.