Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Copyright vs. Copyleft

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 15:08 +0000, Lee Braiden wrote:
> No, my point is that free software is "free as in freedom", and that, if 
> the freedom to obtain the sourcecode and alter a binary is lost, it is 
> no longer free software, in the sense I'm used to.  Open source, maybe.

Software 'A' under the BSD licence is free for me because I get the
freedom to change and redistribute the software; the four FSF freedoms
are there. The fact that software 'B' which is derived from 'A' is not
free software does not affect the freeness, for me.

Are you saying that you consider BSD-licensed software not to be free
software?

> But yes, you seem to be getting that, from how you refer to BSD.  Can 
> you fill me in on why they argue that such guarantees of freedom are 
> unnecessary?  I thought BSD-types liked their license too, but just 
> didn't like the extra restrictions of copyleft.

Well, the extra restrictions you refer to are the disallowance of any
proprietisation of the software. As in, they explicitly allow people to
take their free software and make it proprietary/not-free software.

Some (small sections) of the BSD community refer to GPL'd software as
"not free" or (more commonly) "less free" precisely because the end-user
has fewer rights to the software. You seem to be arguing that BSD
software is "not free" because the rights that you have are not
protected going forwards. I think the majority viewpoint is that neither
is correct ;)

Cheers,

Alex.