[Discuss] OSS licenses

[Jerry Feldman]

From time to time, we have had speakers on various OpenSource licensing
speak at the BLU. The GPL was born because developers were contributing
their stuff to the public domain, and some people were grabbing those
and copyrighting that code. The original GPL was also referred to as
"copyleft". But, there are a lot of issues with all licensing. Take a
commercial closed-source project that runs on Linux, but it incorporates
some GPL'd code into its product, such as Bison and Flex. The
closed-source developer needs to be careful that his code does not
become polluted by the GPL, and at the same time he needs to be
respectful of the third-party licensing or code that he distributed. For
instance, most code on Linux is compiled using some version of GCC. It
also uses libraries, like libc that is GPL code.

In any case, maybe we can set up a future BLU meeting and get a speaker
who can simply explain both GPL as well as other OpenSource licenses
like Apache, BSD, and a few others.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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