Aslam Rafee of South Africa's Government Communication and Information System ``was asked to get some feedback from the list on the adoption of an open source license for software the government creates.''. I replied supporting the BSD license, of course. Many replies just showed lack of understanding of the licenses, and other expressed the desire to prevent any non-open-source use of government-developed code.

Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 10:17:38 +0200
From: Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org>
To: oss@list.gov.za
Subject: Re: [OSS] Licesing
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On Thu 2003-10-02 (09:54), Aslam Raffee wrote:
> I was asked to get some feedback from the list on the adoption of an open
> source license for software the government creates. The GPL and BSD licenses
> have feautured the most in our discussions.  It is appreciated that some
> projects might need special consideration in terms of licensing however we
> would like to recommend a default license for Government all things being
> equal. What does the list think ?

Hi Aslam,

Sorry for the late reply, I've been away.

The GPL vs. BSD debate is not one that will ever be solved in committee.
There're arguments for and against both - and both have their successes
and their failures.  The advocates on both sides are set in their ways,
and believe their own studies and refuse to believe the "proof" of their
opponents.

Firstly, I'd like to voice a major vote against GPL on the grounds that
it isn't usable by other open source software.  A BSD-licensed project
can't use the code without being forced to become GPL.  That's a major
downside that has negatively affected a number of projects that I've
worked on personally.

The LGPL is a "componentised" version of the GPL that allows distinct
code areas ("libraries") to be covered by GPL, and thus all the benefits
of code of that component having to be distributed when a binary based
on that component is distributed.

This allows commercial and open source use of a component without having
to change the entire licensing terms of their software.  This makes the
most sense - our mission is not to force other users of the software to
put _their_ work into the GPL, just that improvements to our work are
made available.

Personally, I believe that software generated by government should be
usable by anyone for any purpose.  The BSD license aims to create the
greatest good - ``our first and foremost mission is to provide code to
any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the
widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit''.

However, I think you'll find that much work that government may be doing
may be forced to be in the license of the software they're working upon.

Cheers,

Neil
--
Neil Blakey-Milner
nbm@mithrandr.moria.org