HP's Martin Fink arguing for copyleft licenses

Hugo Roy hugo at fsfe.org
Sun Nov 1 20:41:47 UTC 2015


Hi Fabian,

↪ 2015-11-01 Sun 12:20, Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de>:
> Mr. Fink also seems to knowingly conflate the Linux kernel with the free
> software community in general, for example when he spreads the FUD about
> DTrace and ZFS which according to him can't be used by "the community".

In that case, it's not far fetched considering the licenses for ZFS
was apparently designed with the intention to make it incompatible
with major existing licenses used in large shares by the free software
community. (That's what I have heard repeatedly anyway.)

Free software licenses should reduce friction to allow greater flow of
code, instead of deliberately increasing it.

That, and without forgetting that there are (were?) patents on ZFS
stuff, which you cannot completely ignore (even outside the Linux
kernel community).

> While the fact that they are licensed under the CDDL might be inconvenient
> for GNU/Linux distributions, for various other operating systems it's not
> a big deal and (from their point of view) even preferably to a more
> restrictive license like the GPL.

The fact that there are more permissive licenses than the GPL doesn't
mean it's not a big deal to make a GPL incompatible license.

It's a big deal to make a license that's not compatible with the most
popular licenses, whether these licenses are copyleft or non-copyleft.


Best,

-- 
Hugo Roy – Free Software Foundation Europe https://fsfe.org/about/roy
 
Please use cryptography for email: see https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/
Merci d’utiliser la cryptographie pour l’email : voir https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/fr/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 455 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20151101/d9a5d019/attachment.sig>


More information about the Discussion mailing list