[kwlug-disc] Permissive vs copyleft licenses

[Chris Frey]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 02:24:20PM -0500, Doug Moen wrote:
> The GNU project seems to have been a reaction to the BSD project. The
> goal was not simply to create useful new free software like Emacs,
> it was to create a complete replacement for BSD under a competing free
> software licence. But the original BSD software that RMS was cloning
> stills exists, and can be found in BSD distributions.

Not sure what you mean by that.  From what I can tell, GNU was a
reaction to proprietary licenses, not a reaction to a free BSD project.

	https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
	https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html
	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
	https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/unix-license.html
	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.

	1971		- RMS begins at MIT in a free software world by default
	1976		- Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists
	1978		- BSD license
	1980's		- proprietary licenses claim parts of Unix systems...
			  to run a complete one, you had to agree to a
			  software license, as I understand it
	1983		- GNU project starts, to avoid such license agreements
	1985		- FSF starts
	Feb 1989	- GPLv1 license released
	Jun 1989	- Net/1 BSD
	Jun 1991	- Net/2 BSD
			- GPLv2 license released
	Jul 1991	- Linus's post to comp.os.minix
	1992		- Linux released under GPLv2
	early 1990's	- AT&T, BSDi, and University of California Berkeley
			  in court fighting over Unix / BSD
	mid 1990's	- Novell buys AT&T Unix, UCB terminates BSD support

If there had never been proprietary licenses, there would likely have
never been GNU or GPL.

GNU and Linux have the dis/advantage of copyleft baggage, but the advantage
that they were written in a free software world from the bottom up.
There was never any dispute to its origins such as BSD had to extract
itself from (and is now fully extracted from).

- Chris