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Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

nano(1) is GPLv3 last time I checked and that imposes more restrictions than most (all?) of the rest of the code in NetBSD. It is not about being "reflexive", it is a violation of the very ethos of the project. Gnu rejecting non-free licenses from their own distributions is not "reflexive", it is simply not in line with what they want to achieve and one should respect that.

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Unless they modify it, the GPL really doesn't impact them. AFAIK FSF considers most BSD/MIT style licences to be compatible. It's the other way around where things gets stuck. Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

> Unless they need Linux GPU/WIFI/BT drivers to make things work, of course. Then it's fine.

The parts of Linux that get integrated into BSDs should not be GPL-licensed, e.g. <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c339f4010dea8b0d754f8...> and its siblings use MIT.

Modification is the whole point of open source: "Unless you want to modify Windows, the closeness does not impact you". If you want to learn about how NetBSD looks at things, there is this page:

https://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html

As for being compatible. Yes, FSF considers anything permissive to be compatible with their family of licenses. However, it is a one-way relationship in that permissive code can be freely used by GPL projects, but not the other way around as using GPL code would impose further restrictions compared to a permissive license.

> Modification is the whole point of open source

Yes, and free software wants to ensure it remains open. BSD's don't.

Not trying to be hostile here, but when you accuse "the other camp" of being "reflexive", maybe it is wise to have a look in the mirror and reflect over a statement like this? It is dismissive, no? Hostile? Possibly. At that, it is against people that have spent millions of man hours producing code that is free to use by all of mankind.

I have read the majority of Stallman's writings, I have met and talked to the man himself, and I even secured a signed poster for myself and the local computer club. But, I find both the argument that sharing the code without viral restrictions and with viral restrictions plausible as ways forward to greater software freedom. Heck, I would argue that history shows that the diversity of tactics has proven successful and that we are better off today than ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. So, maybe refrain from boilerplate retorts as we have bigger fish to fry and shut up and hack?

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