Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:50:26 +0100 From: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Learn from History, please (was Re: new license idea?) Message-ID: <20000919195026.A72836@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> In-Reply-To: <200009191810.LAA06018@usr02.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 06:10:36PM %2B0000 References: <20000919175403.B71735@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <200009191810.LAA06018@usr02.primenet.com>
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<hopping down off Uncle Terry's knee> That was really a fascinating story. I love the 'untold' history even more than the documented stuff! Now we have, as Paul Harvey would say, 'the rest of the story.' A few questions (you knew they were coming ;-) 1. If a company has no real competitors for a product, how can they be marginalized? Suppose a BSD licensed digital paint program appeared, and a company used the code and extended it to a proprietary version especially suited to photograph processing. Suppose they kept the changes to the code, and no competitors appeared. How would they become marginalized? Simply because of the maintenance pressures of continuing to merge current changes from the open source branch with their own? 2. Using the illustration of the two firewall companies, how could Company B remain profitable after opening its source? Does the concept of strategic victory include getting your foot in the door (or your code in the tree) at the expense of short-term profits? 3. Do any of these arguments apply differently to separate apps than to operating systems? 4. I am a bit unclear on this paragraph: | So the claims of fragmentation risk are really exagerated; they are, | in fact, FUD. One does not need a license to protect one from a | fragmentation or a code hijack, unless the code is strategic, in | which case, one is better off not revealing it at all, since it is | easy to read with one hand and type with the other; not only easy, | but the economic pressures in Silicon Valley have raised it to a | fine art, to the point of having its own name: "clean rooming". Do you mean that a really good 'secret' or innovation is best protected by not releasing it at all, at least for a time? Or is there an additional meaning? And what is "clean rooming"? jcm -- "I drank WHAT ?!" - Socrates To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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