>Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed “open source” licenses are also FSF-blessed “free software licenses”; they are not “totally against what the FSF and Stallman is all about.”
To both dragonwriter and steveklabnik,
Saying "totally against" was too strong. Let me try to clarify.
Yes, the GNU license list has "The following licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL."[1]
To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying philosophy of FSF and Stallman. That just says using those licenses as part of GPL projects is acceptable. However, they don't really fulfill Stallman's strategy and objectives.
An example of what I mean by BSD & MIT not aligning with Stallman's objectives would be past comments about him missing the chance to include Chris Lattner's LLVM/clang project in GCC.[2]
Presumably, Stallman would have not let llvm/clang become permissive-BSD license like Lattner did. He would prefer llvm/clang's valuable capabilities to be licensed as copyleft-GPL just like GCC. (More commentary on that style of thinking.[3]) To him, the permissive licenses "helps the enemies create proprietary software" (paraphrasing previous Stallman comments).
That's why I believe FSF and OSI have fundamental incompatibilities. The MIT & BSD licenses being on the GNU "approved" list doesn't really solve that.
EDIT to add reply to: >The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide.
I disagree because it seems that Stallman has taken great pains to explain why they are not aligned on the freedoms that software should provide. There is some overlap between FSF and OSI but that's different from alignment.
> To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying philosophy of FSF and Stallman.
Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's a slightly different issue.
The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide. They differ on how problematic they view software that does not do that, and (largely as a consequence of the preceding disagreement) on how to best move toward a view where the benefits of software providing the freedom they agree on is broadly enjoyed.
> Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's a slightly different issue.
I don't think this is accurate. Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license can be relicensed under the GPL because nothing in it contradicts the GPL. BSD, MIT, Apache, etc. licenses don't put any restrictions on how you can relicense the software, therefore they can be relicensed under the GPL.
The philosophy if the FSF is that you should have access to the code of the software you run, and that all software should be GPL. It helpfully offers a list of software that can be used as a base for GPL'd software.
In this case, "compatability" should actually be read as in "IBM-compatable" not as "simpatico" or "synonymous."
To both dragonwriter and steveklabnik,
Saying "totally against" was too strong. Let me try to clarify.
Yes, the GNU license list has "The following licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL."[1]
To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying philosophy of FSF and Stallman. That just says using those licenses as part of GPL projects is acceptable. However, they don't really fulfill Stallman's strategy and objectives.
An example of what I mean by BSD & MIT not aligning with Stallman's objectives would be past comments about him missing the chance to include Chris Lattner's LLVM/clang project in GCC.[2]
Presumably, Stallman would have not let llvm/clang become permissive-BSD license like Lattner did. He would prefer llvm/clang's valuable capabilities to be licensed as copyleft-GPL just like GCC. (More commentary on that style of thinking.[3]) To him, the permissive licenses "helps the enemies create proprietary software" (paraphrasing previous Stallman comments).
That's why I believe FSF and OSI have fundamental incompatibilities. The MIT & BSD licenses being on the GNU "approved" list doesn't really solve that.
EDIT to add reply to: >The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide.
I disagree because it seems that Stallman has taken great pains to explain why they are not aligned on the freedoms that software should provide. There is some overlap between FSF and OSI but that's different from alignment.
[1] from: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html