errors in "Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project"

[Mike Miller]

Dear Bruce:

I just read your article here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html

Midway through that document (Section 5) you present "some rules of thumb 
when using the GPL."  The first one states "you cannot sell the software 
itself."  But that is not true.  From the GPL FAQ:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

    Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
        Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies
    is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special
    situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one
    exception is the required written offer to provide source code that
    must accompany binary-only release.)

In "What a license cannot do" you make claims about Mattel and Cygnus that 
are misleading.  The Mattel case didn't get anywhere -- that was back in 
2000 and cphack is still freely available on the 'net.  If Cygnus "[took] 
over development of the FSF compiler tools," I think that is a good thing 
because it means that a company that might have historically made more 
money under a proprietary business model is instead contributing to a GPL 
code base.  No one can really "take over" a GPL'd project -- it is just a 
fork, and if it is a good fork it may become predominant, but that is not 
a "take over."

In the end, you basically suggest that the sole advantage of the BSD 
license over the GPL is that the BSD license attracts developers who want 
to use a proprietary model of software development. In other words, the 
BSD license is best for those who would like to profit from our code 
without giving back any code to the developer community.  What's good 
about that?  That clearly is the core issue.  Couldn't you have left off 
nearly everything else and just told the reader why he should want his 
code to be used in proprietary software projects that compete with open 
source projects?

Regards,

Mike

-- 
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/