Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 00:15:10 -0400 From: James Howard <howardjp@wam.umd.edu> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Response to ZDNet's anti-BSD Story Message-ID: <200006070415.AAA05828@rac5.wam.umd.edu>
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Okay, so I prepared a response to ZDNet's BSD bashing. I intend to submit it to OSOpinion sometime tomorrow. I decided to send it to the mailing list first to solicit suggestions and recomendations on it. So, without further ado, here it is, enjoy. Jamie Kerberos and the GPL James Howard On Tuesday, June 6, Evan Leibovitch wrote (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2582875,00.html) about Microsoft's wrangling of the Kerberos protocol. Microsoft had taken the open source MIT software, made changes affecting compatibility, and released the new version without the source code. The Kerberos code is licensed under a license similar to both the BSD operating system and the X11 Windowing system. Leibovitch blames the license for allowing Microsoft to introduce proprietary extensions into the protocol and claims that if Kerberos had been licensed under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPL) Microsoft would have been unable to embrace and extend the Kerberos standard. However, Leibovitch does not get it. This was the best possible outcome and it was forced by the liberal license. There are three paths this project could have taken: * First, Microsoft could have ignored Kerberos completely and left the broader community with an entirely new standard with zero support from other software in the community. * Second, the Kerberos code could have been released under the GPL. If this had happened, the Microsoft would have surely refused to use the code to prevent having to reveal proprietary source. Microsoft would have then reimplemented the code and still modified the protocol. Had Microsoft been forced to reimplement the code, it would surely contain an unknown number of bugs and compatibility issues. * First, the Kerberos code could have been released under a Berkeley-style license. Microsoft could have then taken the code and distributed a modified version and maintained some level of compatibility with existing implementations and installations of Kerberos. This is, in fact, what happened and by far the best possible outcome of this scenario. As can be clearly seen, the liberal licensing of the Kerberos code permitted and encouraged a potentially nightmare scenario in software development to become a smaller and containable issue. Further, as we can see, other licensing of the software would have only made the situation worse and forced increased headaches and problems upon systems administrators and implementors. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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