On 07 September 2001, Philip Hazel said:
> Red Hat were unhappy with the GPL licence. They wanted a more BSD-like
> one, ISTR (but my memory may not be accurate). I wasn't interested in
> messing around with multiple licences.
>
> Debian, of course, insist on GPL, don't they?
No, I believe Debian only insists on an license compatible with the
"open source definition" (OSD). In fact, the OSD has its roots in the
Debian Free Software Guidelines. It's no coincidence that Bruce Perens
was involved in both. ;-) The GPL and BSD licenses are the best-known
examples of OSD-compatible licenses, but others include the Mozilla
license, the Zope license, IBM's open source license, etc. etc.
(See
http://www.debian.org/social_contract for more info.)
Of course, you can still get non-OSD compatible software from Debian;
it's just squirreled away in a directory called "non-free".
Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer gward@???
MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org
