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ZDNet: Fatal flaw in BSD? - The Kerberos Affair shows weakness of BSD software license.

Jun 06, 2000, 20:48 (16 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Evan Leibovitch)

"Certainly one could take Microsoft to task for the ethics of taking an open standard and turning it proprietary. But why it was done, to me, is neither as interesting nor as genuine a source of concern as how it was done or how it can be prevented in the future."

"You see, the Kerberos code that Microsoft "enhanced" is distributed under a BSD-style license similar to the one used by XFree86. This is the kind of license that generally allows anyone who legally obtains the source code to make modifications without requiring such modifications themselves to be open. Indeed, the copyright file that comes in the current Kerberos code explicitly says:"

"Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted."

"In contrast, the GNU Public License, under which Linux and most of its tools are distributed, requires that all modifications must be as open as the original code."

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