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Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source. Yehuda Katz shares my own philosophy on Open Source licensing—stick BSD or MIT on it to maximise the number of people who can use it. The projects I work on are small enough that I don’t care if someone makes big private improvements and refuses to share them. I can see how much larger projects like Linux would disagree though.

Posted 6th January 2010 at 5:23 pm

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6 comments

  1. Think of the benefits though if Linux had gone this route - we could have had OSX built on Debian/Ubuntu with a proper package management system at the core. OS X feels like stepping back to Windows with a (far) better GUI - or to 2003 when I last used FreeBSD!

    Peter Bowyer - 6th January 2010 23:23 - #

  2. "Think of the benefits though if Linux had gone this route"

    Linux is much more widely used than Mac OS X - it's on a bunch of infrastructure and embedded stuff for a start. And with a permissive licence, it's likely that a lot of private forking would have gone on, reducing the momentum of the original project and possibly not cultivating the strength of community (and resulting features) that the Linux, Debian and Ubuntu projects all enjoy today.

    Paul Boddie - 7th January 2010 23:43 - #

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