That's it. GPL is "free" with strings. BSD doesn't have those.
Laughs in BSD 4-Clause, clause #3.
I'll have to disagree there, BSD isn't Free because it never tries to preserve the freedom to modify and tinker. It is merely "open source", just like MPL, CDDL, MIT, Apache and the like.
If you want to lock down your BSD derived code into a "product", and decide to avoid GPL'ed code, at least the GPL'ed code will remain Free for anyone else to use it. Anybody using your product has to beg for permission to your code. It is the perfect license for 2-bit product manufacturers that don't care about software freedom.
but the derivative was never Free in the first place.
That's the argument against "merely open source" style licenses, the freedom stops when someone dictates it stops. I can't integrate a new features done by another author on top of Bob's features with a mix of Alice's new changes, I have to reinvent what Bob did. Bob did not grant the same freedom to anyone else as he was given, he merely took them for himself.
GPL is used precisely because anyone can pick and choose improvements from other authors and not be stopped by somebody deciding to add restrictions and conditions willy-nilly. I can even switch to someone else's branch as a base and then pull in whatever I think is lacking and then sell a widget that runs the software with the source code provided to the customer.
The BSD licensed code also remains Free for anyone else to use it.
So does GPL code, including every derivative down the line. No one may modify the license to add additional terms and conditions. What is Free, remains Free in perpetuity.
If you consider the ability to impose any arbitrary conditions and restrictions anywhere in the distribution chain by anyone more important than the code itself being accessible to everyone, how is that even different from licensing proprietary software? You can even draft a contract to be BSD-like with extra steps for your product so long as all parties agree.
Laughs in BSD 4-Clause, clause #3.
I'll have to disagree there, BSD isn't Free because it never tries to preserve the freedom to modify and tinker. It is merely "open source", just like MPL, CDDL, MIT, Apache and the like.
If you want to lock down your BSD derived code into a "product", and decide to avoid GPL'ed code, at least the GPL'ed code will remain Free for anyone else to use it. Anybody using your product has to beg for permission to your code. It is the perfect license for 2-bit product manufacturers that don't care about software freedom.
That's the argument against "merely open source" style licenses, the freedom stops when someone dictates it stops. I can't integrate a new features done by another author on top of Bob's features with a mix of Alice's new changes, I have to reinvent what Bob did. Bob did not grant the same freedom to anyone else as he was given, he merely took them for himself.
GPL is used precisely because anyone can pick and choose improvements from other authors and not be stopped by somebody deciding to add restrictions and conditions willy-nilly. I can even switch to someone else's branch as a base and then pull in whatever I think is lacking and then sell a widget that runs the software with the source code provided to the customer.
So does GPL code, including every derivative down the line. No one may modify the license to add additional terms and conditions. What is Free, remains Free in perpetuity.
If you consider the ability to impose any arbitrary conditions and restrictions anywhere in the distribution chain by anyone more important than the code itself being accessible to everyone, how is that even different from licensing proprietary software? You can even draft a contract to be BSD-like with extra steps for your product so long as all parties agree.