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by fsloth 4017 days ago
Can you provide examples of software that were released by their original author using BSD/Mit style licence and got steamrolled by a third party who took their code and mangled it?

At least to my knowledge the opposite seems to be more common. Experts release a library under a very permissive licence, and everybody wins. One such example is libPNG.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt
3 comments
alecco 4017 days ago
I got an example, you are likely using it right now.

KHTML (LGPL, not GPL) taken by Apple to make WebKit (LGPL), later "rewritten" and licensed BSD for 2.0.

Apple did also the dirty trick of giving a single huge patch against the previous release of KHTML making it almost impossible to integrate back to the main codebase. Even LGPL can be abused. Lesson learned the hard way by the community.

And you now have everyone parroting how great WebKit is, nobody remembers the original team at KDE. It was brutal.

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anonbanker 4017 days ago
Microsoft did exactly this in Windows 2000 with the BSD-licenced Kerberos. Embraced and Extended.
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throwawaykf05 4017 days ago
Microsoft used their own implementation of Kerberos. From the Kerberos Wikipedia entry:

> While Microsoft uses the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.

The license of the original implementation is thus irrelevant. Pretty much the only thing that would have prevented MS would have been if there were patents on Kerberos.

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dummyfellow 4017 days ago
Did MS use kerberos implementation or the protocol, wiki page isn't very clear on it. If it is 2nd then it would be an entirely different issue, which even GPL/copyleft wouldn't have helped (though oracle java lawsuit may do so).
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anonbanker 4011 days ago
Yes, they used the code itself (which was legal due to the 3-clause license), but didn't credit until publicly shamed. There was a huge stink back in the day because of it.
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throwawaykf05 4017 days ago
MS extended the protocol, not the implementation.

How would the Oracle lawsuit change anything? Protocols are almost explicitly the things that are not protected by copyright. The problem is, people here are confusing interfaces in human-readable code (copyright-eligible) with interfaces for binary interoperability between systems (not eligible).

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anonbanker 4009 days ago
no dude, not only did they take the code and extend the protocol[1], while attempting to relicense it[2], but then they tried to sue /. to remove posts of people that talked about it[3].

1. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Microsoft-und-Open-So... 2. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-... 3. http://features.slashdot.org/story/00/05/18/2015251/our-atto...

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pjmlp 4017 days ago
If Apple hadn't made Swift open source now at WWDC, that would be a fine example.

Or the zillion of extensions being made by companies on top of LLVM.

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