Re: orphaning fetchmail
I think it's highly ironic that the GPL has such grief with the
advertising clause, when it was the advertising clause that tripped up
AT&T during their lawsuit with UC Berkeley over Unix ten years ago. AT&T
was using BSD code and didn't follow that license, thus (in the
settlement) BSD 4.4-Lite (which was BSD minus some 4 files that were
indisputably AT&T's) was released, which led to the *BSD's, and to a great
deal of what you find in a typical Linux distribution. Had that not been
there, most likely there wouldn't have been a freely-licensed BSD OS.
I'm working with Stallman now on modifying the Apache license in such a
way to make it GPL compatible, since I believe fundamentally our
philosophies are compatible. Ask most people who BSD or Apache license
their code if they feel that GPL advocates should be able to use their
code, most will say yes. If I get as far as a draft this'll be one place
I float it.
Making end-users aware of the origin of development is important for many
people, though; there is even language regarding it in the GPL, so
incompatibility is probably something that can be worked through.
Brian
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