Re: Easy to get rid of the lawyers
"This way, no-one can "take over" the kernel and turn it proprietary."
Nobody could take over the kernel and turn it proprietary if it were under a BSD licence either. What they could do would be to take a fork of the kernel and add their proprietary changes to it. That could be done with one of the BSD kernels at any time. The BSD devs are obviously quite aware of that and must be cool with the idea. It's their work and their call as to how its licenced.
Of course as the proprietary fork drifted further away from the original it would become more difficult to apply any patches from the public version so the devs of the proprietary fork would have to assume full responsibility for maintaining it.
But the notion that only the GPL preserves open source code from being taken proprietary seems to be a common misconception.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
