Recently a Linux kernel developer tried to relicense an OpenBSD network driver under the GPL, but was caught early in the process and the error was properly addressed with public rebuke. In an unrelated incident, the vice president of the FreeBSD Foundation reiterated in a statement in his August newsletter that open source software as originally and traditionally exemplified through BSD operating systems, and free software as presented by the Free Software Foundation, are not the same thing. Both OpenBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation representatives separately addressed the same issue: dealing with reality. It’s not an issue for BSD people though — they’ve been dealing with reality for years. It’s really more of a problem for GPL supporters.
“GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope — the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL’d, we cannot get it back,” said OpenBSD Project leader Theo de Raadt in response to the attempted unauthorized re-licensing of BSD driver code. Indeed, the notion that the BSD license allows people to “steal” code and use it in proprietary programs without any compensation or reverse-contribution has been frequently asserted in the perpetual GPL-versus-BSD arguments on the Internet. But when did the BSD license, or anyone who ever licensed code under it, lament that fact? Reality shows that commercial use of BSD-licensed code doesn’t bother anyone in the BSD community. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some reluctance to donate money to the BSD projects that commercial entities rely on, but that’s not a problem that software licenses are meant to address, it’s not specific to the BSD license, and GPL-licensed projects face the same challenge.
The argument that BSD code can be “stolen” and used commercially seems more like a self-fulfilling prophecy for GPL proponents, to whom this practice is the ultimate horror. It almost appears to be an element of sanctimonious antagonism, as though the GPL-relicensers are trying to teach the BSD people a lesson by attempting to exploit the freedom of the BSD license. This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Your code is free to use? Hah! Well I’ll show you what a foolish thing that is!
Justin Gibbs of the FreeBSD Foundation wrote something truly brilliant about dealing with reality in August’s Foundation newsletter: “A GPL proponent might argue that a license for free software must be upgraded periodically since we cannot anticipate what new use models for free software might be developed that restrict freedom. The BSD license is as permissive as possible exactly because we cannot predict the future or to what beneficial purpose (commercial or otherwise) our software will be used.”
So on the one hand we have the FSF trying to change reality through restrictive software licenses; and on the other we have the BSD license, which deals with the mercurial nature of reality just as it is. One assumes that freedom needs to be defined in order to be valid, and protected through multiple convoluted restrictions; the other assumes that freedom finds its own personal definitions for all of us, and only requires that you not remove the author’s copyright notice or the license statement from the code. If there were a Taoist here, he might say that software licenses, like human beings, enter this world warm and soft, and leave it cold and hard.
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