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The posted discussion thread is rather silly, so if you find the analogy silly, it only comes as a result of an silly "2 Minute Hate of the FSF/GPL/RMS". I also find it strains the bounds of credibility that someone accuses people of being involved when they has nothing to support the accusations. This is what the term conspiracy theory was created for, like "it must be aliens who did it" or "A shadow Government". Its nutjobs that talk to other nutjobs, creating their own reality in order to feel good about themselves. RMS answer this speculation directly at: http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-stra... But sure, lets talk to the real issue. BSD permit that changes to copyrighted work be placed under a different license. This explicit permission is why proprietary software developers like BSD/MIT licensed software, since they can do changes and then add a proprietary license to the then created derivate work. GPL do not permit this, and thus we have the difference between GPL and BSD. The question about what defines derivate work is originality, which the word "small" or "big" has no impact on. A small change to a large body of work has similar impact as a green change to a yellow body of work. Originality do not care about sizes, it cares about creativity (in the United States). In the linked mailing list, there is also some discussion if an redistribution of a work can add a license without doing any changes at all, which is how the apple app store does it. Apple puts puts work that is under BSD, with no changes, and redistribute it in the app store under the terms of app store license. The legal view by most lawyer/apple/fsf and others is that apple is legally allowed to do so under BSD license, since the requirement for distribution has been followed by Apple. If there is a change in consensus regarding this, the proprietary software distributors would be the first to react and the small number of BSD work that get distributed under GPL, while still retaining the BSD notice, would be quite small in comparison. The relevant part of the mailinglist discussion can be seen here: http://openbsd.7691.n7.nabble.com/Real-men-don-t-attack-stra... |