Translations:Essays:Why are GPL-licensed components removed from the FreeBSD base system/7/en

Permissive licenses

Although the industry embraced legal innovation, disagreements began to emerge among the proponents of free software – not everyone shared Stallman's idea of communal ownership that the GPL helped create. The obligation to return the code to the community on the same terms seemed onerous to them. No wonder, that one of the most vivid examples of such a disagreement occurred with the BSD operating system. (Let me remind you that it was a derivative of the original UNIX and developed at the University of California, Berkeley. BSD did not yet have the prefix "Free", "Open", or "Net"). Stallman wanted the code of this operating system to be distributed under the terms of the GPL, but one of the key BSD developers Keith Bostic did not share those very ideas of communal ownership. As a result, when Bostic made the BSD networking code free in 1989, he chose a license for it, which did not restrict anyone in anything and even allowed anyone to close the source. His only condition at that time was to indicate the name of the university in the description of derivative works. Thus, what one person saw as evil, another person saw as an interesting opportunity. By the way, Berkeley also called their license BSD. (Today it is extremely popular in the free software community.)