License needed!

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Mon, Oct 11, 1999 at 12:45:21PM -0700, Duncan Kinder wrote:
> I don't want to start a religious war here, but it could help clarify things
> if we could establish (philosophically) what is wrong with the Berkeley
> license.

The advertisment clause was a serious problem to just the BSD license
(up to 1999).  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

Otherwise it has the same problems as most other non-copylefted
licenses (like the MIT or XFree86 license). Companies can take the code
improve it a bit and make the result locked up and proprietory.

Richard Stallman presents a lenghy exampple of that:	 
	http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html

The only situation where you want to use a X-Style or Artistic License
in my view is, when you want ot do a reference protocol implementation
for everybody to play around with and use it. (But then you want
proprietory products to endorse and use that.) And GRASS certainly does
not fall under this category.

> The GPL is fine with me, and I agree with the fellow who said you need any
> license now and worry about improving it later.  In particular, I would not
> let the university lawyer slow things down too much given that the GNU
> license never has been challenged in court, so he really doesn't have that
> much by way of useful information to contribute  ( developing a new license
> is a different matter.)

Using a new license would create a bit of uncertainty and you can make
errors. Any better license for free software should be developed in
cooperation with the FSF. 

	Bernhard
-- 
Research Assistant, Geog Dept UM-Milwaukee, USA.    (www.uwm.edu/~bernhard)
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure              (ffii.org)
Intevation GmbH 
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