Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:05:10 -0600 From: Don Wilde <Don@Silver-Lynx.com> To: jgrosch@mooseriver.com Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD Message-ID: <3ADE39C6.97D24F69@Silver-Lynx.com> References: <3ADCDCA7.A01F5F40@acuson.com> <20010417174700.A79803@mooseriver.com>
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Josef Grosch wrote: > Source people. Lord knows with WindRivers licensing and pricing structure > they are going to need all the good karma points they can get. > That's for sure, Josef. They're as brutal as they come for payware terms. After all, their prime market was our (taxpayers') pocketbook. With the end of the Cold War, a lot of their high dollar contracts have vanished, but for years they commanded a very high price indeed for their toolset. Time will indeed tell. Fortunately, core has the ability to tell WR to hike whenever they want. We might lose one mirror-cycle's worth of changes, but FreeBSD caannot be held hostage by anybody. Bought perhaps, but I very much doubt Jordan or any of the other key players would suborn their own baby. They believe too much in the viability of FreeBSD as a long-term plus to allow somebody with a personal agenda to pervert the main threads of development. We've seen several attempts to do that already, and FreeBSD still looks awfully healthy to me. We will see spin-offs, perhaps, but I think it unlikely that WR will expose much of their code to us. As for knowledge flowing the other way, that's why people like Jordan get on company payrolls and we like that. That's what the BSD license is all about, is people having expertise that's valuable to employers because BSD is reaally useful stuff. We want employers to employ developers, and if they'd rather our people work for them rather than putting our salary time towards the Project, we're still ahead of the game. core will still code; it's in their brain stem cells. As for Slackware, it's up to their guys to cut the mustard. Right? I mean, if it's a viable project other contributors will step up and development will go forward. It's all too easy to forget that the concept of employing open source developers to work on _anything_ was far-fetched, let alone working on an OS on company time. Linux guys have a tendency to get angry about almost anything these days. Relax, it just means we'll outlive them. :-) -- Don Wilde Don@Silver-Lynx.com Silver Lynx Embedded Microsystems Architects 2218 Southern Bl. Ste. 12 Rio Rancho, NM 87124 505-891-4175 FAX 891-4185 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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