Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 11:58:03 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Microsoft Message-ID: <20010628115803.G9802@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <001b01c0ffb7$2525b4a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 02:46:03AM -0700 References: <20010628111710.E9802@lpt.ens.fr> <001b01c0ffb7$2525b4a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Ted Mittelstaedt said on Jun 28, 2001 at 02:46:03: > "...FreeBSD has traditionally been an operating system that encouraged > unencumbered experimentation. ... And that's what we're using it for. We're > using it to prove the point that you can actually implement the CLI on Unix. > It's been around a long time, people use it commercially. Microsoft uses it > commercially, actually...." > > In case you missed it he just said that Microsoft uses FreeBSD commercially. > "it" > in this context refers to FreeBSD, not CLI. I think they mean things like Hotmail. Or maybe they borrowed some stuff for Win2K... > >Incidentally, recent moves by Caldera seem to suggest that per-seat > >licensing of a "prettified" distribution is not incompatible with > >linux either. This week's lwn.net editorial takes a surprisingly > >positive stance on this. > > It never has been incompatible. Nothing in the GPL prevents people from > charging for the source - but they must make any source touched by GPL > available for free. Obviously when you do this you can't charge much for > it. The GPL is not incompatible with selling a boxed distribution, but it is incompatible with a "per seat" license. You can sell it to A, but you can't stop A from further redistributing it, or insist that it can be installed only on one machine (or used only by one user). > In Caldera's case they most likely haven't released all their "prettified" > code under GPL, thus they don't have to redistribute that, and thus they can > charge higher prices for the distribution that includes the pretty code. The lwn.net report suggests that their distribution includes third-party commercial software, which is why the distribution as a whole cannot be freely distributed and a per-seat license is possible. They had released their installer under an open-source (I think GPL) license: I don't know whether that has now changed. You are still free to yank out any GPL-covered components of their distribution and redistribute those separately... R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010628115803.G9802>