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EU study recommends OpenBSD

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Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#91

Post by pyre »

wosos wrote: post #86
rakoo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the point. Let me rephrase that: - one of GPL's cool thing is that it prevents proprietary software from including GPL'd code without contributing back to the community - Because BSD is not as strict as GPL regarding license derivation, GPL says "BSD is bad, you're allowing proprietary software to use BSD code without giving back" - Some people take BSD code, modify it and distribute modifications under GP…

One could argue that the they can get the GPL project, build over it too and distribute it. Not much a comparison to proprietary software.

But then they would not be free to use the BSD license, they would have to use the GPL license. If you were able to take a GPL project and "wrap it" in a BSD license, then you would be taking away all of the GPL restrictions effectively rendering the GPL null and void. Do you really think that it is that "easy" to skirt the GPL? What point is the GPL if all you need to do is "wrap it" in a BSD project and then everything becomes BSD licensed?

I guess that other way that I could interpret your response is that you are suggestion that the BSD people should just relicense their stuff as GPL to be able to use GPL'd project. This really ignores the points being made (if this is what you are saying).

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#92

Post by cwyers »

edejong wrote: post #76
jkyle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another free license solves only a small proportion of this problem. True, but with BSD I'm not sure you can view it as a problem to begin with since the license is explicitly designed to legally absolve the user of all obligation to do just that. If you desire monetary contributions be made, some kind of commercial license is the solution. If you desire modifications be contributed back, there are other licenses tha…

There is definitely business value in contributing to these projects. First of all, by contributing, you show a mutual interest in the increased quality of the solution. This in turn will motivate the maintainers to better understand the business concerns of the new contributor. By contributing, the contributor will gain insights in the workings of the solution, thus increasing the quality of the product itself. (As…

There's also a lot of business value in freeriding when the software license explicitly allows you to do so.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#93

Post by yellowapple »

the_af wrote: post #81
weland wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things in this world that are not a business.

Yes, but forget monetary/labor contributions. I think jkyle has a point: the BSD license is a "no strings attached" license, and so it can be chosen by people who presumably don't even want to promote the software, advertise the fact they are using it or campaign for more software like it. If Theo De Raadt finds this disappointing, maybe he should choose a different license?

The problem is that de Raadt and crew have a much bigger priority: that OpenBSD's code proliferate and prevent any duplication of effort in creating secure programs. They've explicitly stated in the past that they consider proprietary use of their code to be a good thing (albeit it would be better if they'd push some money back to the OpenBSD crowd) because it prevents those companies from having to create yet another in-house-developed (and probably half-assed) security implementation.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#94

Post by kyllo »

edejong wrote: post #76
jkyle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another free license solves only a small proportion of this problem. True, but with BSD I'm not sure you can view it as a problem to begin with since the license is explicitly designed to legally absolve the user of all obligation to do just that. If you desire monetary contributions be made, some kind of commercial license is the solution. If you desire modifications be contributed back, there are other licenses tha…

There is definitely business value in contributing to these projects. First of all, by contributing, you show a mutual interest in the increased quality of the solution. This in turn will motivate the maintainers to better understand the business concerns of the new contributor. By contributing, the contributor will gain insights in the workings of the solution, thus increasing the quality of the product itself. (As…

It's also free on-the-job training for your in-house developers, and it probably also helps your company when you're recruiting developers--you can look for potential employees among the other contributors to the same OSS project your company uses.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#96

Post by s73v3r »

jkyle wrote: post #30
joshuapants wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would make them likely to contribute back, they'd just use something else. He'd rather have selfish people using good software than choosing to use something inferior.

Maybe, maybe not. They'd all do the same sort of cost/benefit assessment and if they deemed the benefit to outweigh the cost of contributing back they would do it. There'd be some who would change their options and some that would become contributors. Hard to say how it would pan out. But, when you select a license like BSD (which I've done myself) you shouldn't complain when users don't contribute back. You selected…

I wonder how much of an actual analysis is done in these cases, and how much it's just a boss saying that he doesn't want people "wasting their time" working on something that isn't directly related to their stuff.

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#97

Post by edejong »

cwyers wrote: post #92
edejong wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely business value in contributing to these projects. First of all, by contributing, you show a mutual interest in the increased quality of the solution. This in turn will motivate the maintainers to better understand the business concerns of the new contributor. By contributing, the contributor will gain insights in the workings of the solution, thus increasing the quality of the product itself. (As…

There's also a lot of business value in freeriding when the software license explicitly allows you to do so.

Sure, the business values I mentioned are like 'extra income' over the free-riding 'income' you mention.

(Now this makes me wonder how to book the use of open source software in management accounting)

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#98

Post by yellowapple »

tbrownaw wrote: post #18
jkyle wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theo De Raadt always complained that many of the institutions that run and use OpenBSD don't contribute back. Sounds like he needs a different license then.

I don't think any of the free/open licenses require users to contribute to the parent project. I don't think any even require that people distributing modified versions, send those modifications back upstream.

The Artistic License 2.0 (and possibly 1.0/1.1; I'm not as familiar with their license texts) specifies making changes available to the original author (without necessarily making them public) under the terms of the original license as one option for conditions by which one can use Artistically Licensed code (along with "give it a new name and don't interfere with installing the original version" and "release the source code publicly under a FOSS license", in that order).

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#99

Post by tormeh »

th0br0 wrote: post #23
ersii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Could you elaborate some more and perhaps list a few projects, if you're allowed to?

I primarily know about the projects listed at https://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/809f10db25eddf3e/projects A personal observation is that, nowadays, gitlab seems to be preferred to github as part of a push to rely more on software developed inside the EU (guess it's an aftermath of the whole NSA story). PolicyCompass, for example, lives at https://github.com/policycompass Carneades lives at http://github.com/carneades M…

Never heard of them. Neglected PR?

Re: EU study recommends OpenBSD

#100

Post by yellowapple »

cwyers wrote: post #84
nitramafve wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why some choose to license their work under AGPL.

That still only goes so far, though. If you're building a product on top of a database that's licensed with the AGPL, like Mongo, you have to distribute those changes.* If you build your Intranet site on Mongo, though, you don't need to distribute those changes in a way that gets back to upstream. * I think. And I don't know if this has withstood the sort of court scrutiny the GPL has.

For the intranet site, I think you'd still need to make the source code available to users, who could then make the source publicly available.

IANAL, though, so I don't know if corporate policy forbidding this would be legal under the terms of the AGPL.

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