2005-08-11
GPL'd BSD?
I might be completely off base here, but from my understandings of the BSD license it would be pretty easy for someone to redistribute a BSD distro under the GPL wouldn't it? How come no one has done this? If there were a GPL/LGPL fork of BSD I'd be willing to bet it would explode and grow up to be much more well known than the other guys. This could help prove whether or not my views on the BSD license are true or not ;)
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They could, but it seems a little strange to redistribute something under a more restrictive licence and expect its popularity to boom. I suspect a lot of the BSD devs wouldn't contribute to such a project (and as such their contributions to BSD would be otherwise available without being GPLed, which defies the point), you'd find it difficult to reintegrate your changes to their source (since you can GPL BSDed code, but not the other way around), and you'd probably not gain any of the people currently firmly entrenched with Linux.
I think a more interesting thing about the relative popularities and developments, is that BSD has a Linux compatibility layer, but Linux does not have a BSD compatibility layer. So theoretically the BSDers lose nothing in this.
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