[PD] [semi-OT]: Licenses [WAS] Re: expr alternative

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2011-10-25 à 19:20:00, i go bananas a écrit :

> However, one of the real special gems for me in my journey through the 
> world of pd, was discovering that not only was it a fantastic way to 
> program, but also, that Miller had issued pd through a license that i 
> had never even heard of before, and it was the best sort of license i 
> could imagine.

AFAIK, Pd's original license was the same license that the BSD operating 
system had been using since the seventies. That's probably the oldest free 
license you can still encounter these days. However, Pd's license as I 
have always known it, was created by Richard M Stallman in the late 
nineties in his campaign to make all free software more legally compatible 
with each other. It replaced the original BSD license almost everywhere. 
It was quite an easy switch, because it really was just about deleting the 
advertisement-clause.

BSD licenses have been historically important. They caused BSD OS' builtin 
internet support to be ported to most other OSes, including Windows (first 
as a separate Trumpet WinSock DLL). Ironically, Linux did not use it. As 
another big example of BSD license use, OSX started in the late eighties 
under the name NeXTStep by forking a whole BSD OS. The DRM-crippled iOS 
we're talking about is, in turn, a derivative of OSX.

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC