Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 01:02:29 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Hiten Pandya <hitmaster2k@yahoo.com>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: IBM suing (was: RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD) Message-ID: <3C186EA5.4EA87656@mindspring.com> References: <20011212105559.19177.qmail@web21103.mail.yahoo.com> <3C17482C.3792DAA9@mindspring.com> <20011213115519.F3448@monorchid.lemis.com> <3C18472F.DD3A90D5@mindspring.com> <20011213165513.D3448@monorchid.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: > I know that things have changed since you were IBM. I still find it > difficult to think that they have changed as much as would be > necessary to explain the discrepancy between your viewpoint and my > experience. I left IBM a year ago last September. When IBM acquired Whistle, they DEMANDED that we remove SQUID, which was planned to be in the next release of the software for the next generation product, as it infringed 5 IBM patents, and they did not want to grant license to use those patents, royalty free, by shipping a product with SQUID on it. I think perhaps some of the discrepancy is that you live in a country which does not recognize software patents the way the U.S. does. > > See also the IBM guidelines for the use of Open Source in IBM > > products, > > Been there, done that. Your point? Source has to be vetted to not embody IBM patents, so you are always running down-rev versions of the code that have been through the vetting process, and must download them from internal IBM servers, rather than the net, so that no patented code can "sneak in". My point is that IBM is backing Linux and the GPL purely for marketing reasons, not legal or technical reasons. [ ... ] > Haven't done that. As you yourself say, IBM is very fond of the GPL. No. IBM marketing is fond of the Linux bandwagon. IBM legal really dislikes it. > > We are talking an IBM commercial product, and we are not even talking > > an Open Source license (though the BSD license would have been highly > > preferrable, it was not a business requirement for our FreeBSD based > > product). > > I'm having trouble following you. JFS was released under the > following license (this is taken from linux/fs/jfs/jfs_inode.c): And if they had been willing to release under another license internally to IBM, they would have saved at least 1/8th of a million dollars, that I'm personally able to document. Clearly, their reasons were not technically or product motivated. [ ... ] > I don't know the exact wording of the GPL, but I can't see any > deviation here. Yes, the original code is proprietary. But we are > most definitely talking an open source license, even if it's one you > don't like. Big deal. It's not commercially useful, even interally to IBM, for anything other than marketing blather. For the same reasons, a GPL'ed JFS port to FreeBSD would not be commercially useful, except as IBM/Linux marketing blather. I would much rather write a compatible JFS from scratch, to get out from under the license which makes it useless for embedded systems or other useful work. If it's IBMs intent that the JFS not be adopted by competitors, then it loses al utility to anyone but IBM as a PR puff piece. -- As an overall business philosophy aside: frankly, I don't buy your unified view of IBMs motivations; from my personal experience, business units competed more than they cooperated, and IBM was rarely unified on anything: it's not a single-minded entity. It doesn't take a genius to do the games theoretic math to see that the new variable pay program, which takes everyone in band 10 or higher, and makes their variable pay _more_ contingent on their division performance, while making everyone in band 9 and below's variable pay _more_ contingent on the overall company performance, only made divisions _more_ cut throat towards each other, not less (I guess they figured everyone with math skills was in research and not in the classic banding system). And that's just one systemic example. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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