GPL V. BSD in Laymans Terms

[newbieforumaster]

Sorry to make tons of threads. I am deciding if I want to use smf for my site. I saw that smf is BSD while phpb is GPL. What is the difference in laymans terms?

Will your liscensing CHANGE?


Sorry if this has been asked a million times will you remain free of charge and be open source?

[Arantor]

For you as an end user it makes little or no difference.

The licence for the code in both cases as far as you as a user are concerned are that if you suffer a loss financially or otherwise due to the software, the software is not legally liable, and neither product's teams are required to provide you any support. Both teams do, but they are not obliged to.

The difference in licensing primarily matters for other programmers.

BSD is mostly a formalised 'do whatever you want' licence. The restrictions amount to 'you can go off and do what you like with our code, but you can't claim you wrote it'. It also means other groups are free to take the code, rename it, rebrand it, and make a lot of changes and then release it under whatever licence they like - including a paid licence if they so desire.

GPL is far more restrictive in that respect. You can still take a GPL piece of code, rename it, rebrand it and build your own software off it, but you can't change the licence. The main point is that anyone who gets the code after you has to follow the same licence. In that respect it is more open because anyone can always get the code and always have the right to change it, something that BSD code can lose.

On the other hand, getting modifications made for you is a bit trickier because people have issues with selling code that is GPL (because by definition, anyone that receives a modification that they have paid for can share it legally with anyone else), while it's quite possible to sell modifications to a BSD platform because the modifications don't have to be BSD themselves.

The licensing on SMF is extremely unlikely to change. The project that came before SMF and which inspired SMF was actually GPL, and some of the abuses that went on prompted SMF 1.0 and 1.1 to adopt a much harsher licence, before relenting and going BSD. I sincerely doubt the licence will change.