[Asterisk-Users] Re: Advice on OS Choice

[Kevin Walsh]

Joe Greco [jgreco at ns.sol.net] wrote:
> Selling a product isn't disallowed under either GPL or BSD style licenses.
> The really big difference is that you can't take GPL'd code, change it, and
> sell or distribute it without distributing your changes (an
> oversimplification, but anyways...) whereas with a true free software
> license, you don't have any serious restrictions on what you can do with
> it - you can bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate it, you can choose to
> distribute your works for free, for money, with or without source code,
> etc.  The GPL strips some of these freedoms by forcing the distribution of
> source code.  It does not, however, prevent the code from being sold.
>
The GPL protects the freedom of the source code and couldn't care less
about the "freedom" of those who would seek to close the code.

Code released under the GPL will always be free.  Code released under
BSD-style licenses can be distributed free or can be distributed as
part of a proprietary package.  Apple would not have been allowed to
use the Linux kernel in their closed source OS/X effort, but were able
to use the BSD kernel without any legal issues at all.  Microsoft also
make use of BSD code in their offerings.

Basically, if you release code under the GPL then you do so knowing
that your code will always be freely available and will benefit from
fixes and new features etc.  If you release code under a BSD-style
license then your code has no such protection, and improved versions
do not have to be released with any freedom at all.

People who say "the GPL strips some of these freedoms" really don't
understand what freedom means.

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