[ILUG-BOM] BSD

[lawgon at antispam]

Quoting Devdas Bhagat <devdas at dvb.homelinux.org>: 
 
> On 17/08/06 02:40 -0700, lawgon at au-kbc.org wrote: 
> > Quoting Devdas Bhagat <devdas at dvb.homelinux.org>:  
> >   
> <snip> 
> > > Which works on the assumption that people using/deriving BSD code want  
> > > to stay in sync with HEAD.  
> > >   
> > > I don't know of too many projects doing this. They usually use the BSD  
> > > stuff as a way to get to a running start, but not much beyond that.  
> >   
> > again postgresql, django, zope, lighttpd, apache?, subversion?  
> >   
> And how many of those have been rolled into closed products with 
> significant changes, and kept on going that way? 
 
does it matter - if software is free shouldnt people be free to roll them into 
their closed source projects. Not a nice thing to do, i agree, but certainly 
allowable. The reason why mysql doesnt give commit rights to people who are 
either not employed by them or not on contract with them is because of the 
whole hassle of who owns what is committed - which means they lose a lot of 
potential committers and commits. Postgresql doesnt have that problem. If you 
are good enough, you get commit rights. After all in the last analysis, if i 
'write' code and own copyright in it, the question is 'how much did i write?'. 
At the most just an incremental improvement on the work of lakhs of others. So 
why worry overmuch about someone 'stealing' it. These things may have been 
relevant 10 years ago - they are not relevant now. 
 
kg