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Seeing big companies take advantage of BSD or MIT licensed projects without sharing their contributions will always pain me.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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I read a story of someone that contributed to a BSD project, including fixes over some period of time, but later they ended up having to use a proprietary UNIX for work, that included their code, in a an intermediate, buggy state, but they were legally forbidden from applying their own bug fixes!
At the very least the GPL guarantees that if I am ever downstream of myself, I has fix my own damn mistakes and don't have to suffer them.
I am still willing to contribute to BSD stuff, but vastly prefer something like the AGPLv3.
So it's an argument against restrictive licenses? The more freedom the better? I mean Unix in this case had a too restrictive license?
What? GPL does not restrict freedom, it ensures its continued existence.
Read above please. You cannot import GPL code into BSD licensed code without restricting the code distribution. In the other direction, you can do it and just add a notice about the license. It does not add restrictions to the distribution. Otherwise Linux distributions wouldn't even have OpenSSH in base install images.
It's an argument against a license that permits relicensing under a more restrictive license. (E.g. BSD)
Of other software, yes. For example Linux distributions can use the BSD or MIT licensed code without any problems.
But it does not allow to remove the license from the software.
On the other hand GPL code cannot be imported into BSD code without introducing restrictions.