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There seems to be a large(ish?) portion of the free software community that devotes a large amount of its time and energy to handwringing and general agitating about licenses.

I really don't get it: Companies are routinely shown to be ignoring GPL and other licensing with zero consequence and your average computer user probably doesn't even understand the concept of a source code license.

Does anyone really think that if OpenBSD had some GPL'ed code in there, and $company was taking that code and distributing it closed-source, that there would be any consequences whatsoever? If so, why does this never make the news? If not, then why do these people bother?



One of the reasons I like BSD license as an author, philosophy aside, is there's simply much less policing involved.




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