It's Monday, heading towards the dark winter in the Northern hemisphere, but you can look forward to BSD conferences in the new year. See

"What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!"

It's where the Internet comes from! -- https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html - https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-is-bsd-come-to-conference-to-find.html - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterhansteen_without-the-bsd-code-no-internet-the-bsd-activity-7393293662849241088-DZFB? -https://medium.com/@peter.hansteen/what-is-bsd-come-to-a-conference-to-find-out-06acd7d77fd8
#BSD #Unix #FreeBSD #OpenBSBD #NetBSD #DragonFlyBSD #Freesoftware #Libresoftware #BSDlicense #permissivelicensing

"What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!" It's where the Internet comes from!

Read more: https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html
https://medium.com/@peter.hansteen/what-is-bsd-come-to-a-conference-to-find-out-06acd7d77fd8
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-is-bsd-come-to-conference-to-find.html
#BSD #Unix #FreeBSD #OpenBSBD #NetBSD #DragonFlyBSD #Freesoftware #Libresoftware #BSDlicense #permissivelicensing

In short, GPL uses copyright law to protect you, as an author of software, from exploitation better than MIT or BSD software licenses do. Here we have a case of the Anthropic corporation using MIT-licensed code in one of their software products, which is of course a for-profit product. The original author of that code received no compensation, as it is not required by the license. So the author applied for a job at Anthropic, and ironically, Anthropic responded with an AI-generated rejection letter. Corporations like Anthropic seem to have an allergy to GPL-licensed code however, due to the nature of how the GPL license grants much more specific rights and restrictions, both to the authors of the code, and the companies who use it.

Of course, nowadays LLMs can ingest GPL and MIT/BSD licensed code and spit it back out in altered form, essentially letting the makers of the LLM profit from your work without compensating you, so the GPL is probably due for an “upgrade” to prevent use for AI training. Unfortunately thanks to regulatory capture, and not-so-impartial courts of law mostly ignoring copyright law nowadays, it might not even be possible to use GPL or copyright to protect authors of software anymore. Probably a whole new legal framework is required first, and I don’t think this will be happening any time soon.

#tech #software #AI #GPL #MITLicense #BSDLicense #GPLLicense #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS

Understanding Open Source Licensing
Open source software has revolutionized the tech industry by promoting collaboration, transparency, and in…
https://linuxexpert.org/understanding-open-source-licensing/

#gpl #opensource #bsdlicense #fsf #cisco #microsoft #apple #linux

If you're writing open-source software, please do yourself and other software developers a favor and familiarize yourself with how software licensing works. As an Ubuntu Developer, much of my work involves auditing the source code licensing of various applications. Most of these applications have miserably complicated licensing situations, sometimes with licensing violations involved. I also occasionally run into licensing or copyright terms that an author probably didn't intend to specify, but that they did specify unambiguously nonetheless.

For instance, did you know that if you state that a file is "under the GPL license" without specifying what version, that means that the user of your file can use it under *any* version of the GPL they want to? Look at GPLv1 Section 7, GPLv2 Section 9, and GPLv3 Section 14 if you don't believe me. I found a file written in 2017 with these licensing terms. Did the author *mean* to do this? Probably not, they probably wanted to use GPLv3 (or maybe GPLv2). But since they didn't specify a version, I'm within my legal right to use this code under GPLv1's terms if I care to. I'm not going to do that since I have no interest in using this file for anything, but it goes to show you how a slip-up in your licensing specification can cause people to have rights or be free of restrictions you didn't want to give them or let them be free from.

Another (very very common) slip-up is for most of the source code in a repository to have license headers specifying GPLv2 *or later*, but with no repository-wide license specified in an AUTHORS or README file, and with a GPLv2 license in a LICENSE or COPYING file. What you probably *think* this does is license your program under GPLv2 or later, but what it *actually* does is give you a messy mixed-licensing situation with some files licensed GPLv2 only and some files licensed GPLv2 or later. Why? Because the default repository-wide license is GPLv2 as set by the LICENSE or COPYING file, and all of the headers that specify GPLv2 or later are overriding that default license.

You may think, "Why can't someone just infer that because most of the files are GPLv2 or later, that all of them are?" Great question! There's two answers. One, if you unambiguously specify something you didn't mean to specify, whatever you specified is what's legally binding. There's not room for "well that's what I said, but what I meant was..." in licensing. Secondly, many projects *actually use multiple licenses in one project* (for instance you'll have GPL, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, and MIT licenses all in one application). So how does one know if you just "accidentally" specified the wrong license, or if you meant to make a mixed-license application? They can't determine your intent with 100% certainty, so they have to obey what you said, *not* what you meant to say.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. This is just advice on how to help keep software developers from having headaches and problems reusing code.

#opensource #software #licensing #linux #gpl #bsdlicense #mitlicense #bsd #mit #foss