For a otherwise very interesting and up-vote worthy comment, I really don't know what to do with comments that also include derogatory terms.
The project sound interesting, the comment is very much relevant in today's post-NSA world. So should I downvote, upvote, or not vote at all? If the comment had used a neutral word, rather than a derogatory term, it would not be a question about it.
I'd admit a wrongdoing if you can explain how to poison a project with BSD. For me (not an expert in OSS licenses in any way) it sounds like "the victim was poisoned with glass of pure water".
You can vote whatever you feel like, but I'm not selling my opinion for a vote on HN. My opinion is what it is and I can change it if you either provide sufficient argument or threaten my life, health, family or some other factor of my life, more important than my opinion on OSS licensing :-)
I can provide argument why I think GPL is what I think it is, but I seriously doubt this thread is the right place for it.
Users of BSD software still need to follow the BSD license. This mean for 4 clause BSD that you must including the line "This product includes software developed by the <organization>." in All advertising materials. If you are using the Revised BSD License, you still need to include the BSD license in any documentation or "other materials" that is shipped.
So if you like to be in full control over your advertisement, and your documentation, bsd do indeed "poison" the project. It clearly adds restrictions. I would however not use such derogatory term when describing the BSD. Is it really that hard to avoid using derogatory terms and simply use language without it?
I wrote specifically "BSD-type" not BSD. We didn't use BSD license itself, as far as I can tell and the project contains surprisingly small amount of _any_ third party code.
I do not consider "poisonous license" a derogatory term. English is not my native language, may be this is why.
That's fair. I consider calling anything, be that GPL, BSD, or open source as poisonous as to be on the side of derogatory term, similar to the cancer comparison made by Steve Ballmer. I can see however if that’s not always the case for others.
Just as a side note, I found an half year old HN article which talked about the BSD requirements, with suggest that one might want to use ISC license in some cases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798431
Not that your project is code for embedded software (or is it? C code tend to be quite fast and have small memory footprint), but it might be an interesting read.
We designed and coded it with embedded in mind. We both have extensive embedded experience and it was a no brainer with all that hype about "internet of things". Our stack is naturally born IPv6 and as such is a natural match for "things", so not thinking about embedding would have been clearly a mistake.
>So if you like to be in full control over your advertisement, and your documentation, bsd do indeed "poison" the project.
The real trouble with the advertising clause is that it breaks compatibility with several other common licenses. Some of the BSD advocates actually like this because it causes trouble for people who use GPL code (the usual holy war justifications), but the net result is still that you have two otherwise-useful pieces of code that become mutually incompatible for political reasons.
The project sound interesting, the comment is very much relevant in today's post-NSA world. So should I downvote, upvote, or not vote at all? If the comment had used a neutral word, rather than a derogatory term, it would not be a question about it.