From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Mar 22 10:57:17 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from yana.lemis.com (yana.lemis.com [192.109.197.140]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D5FF337C1D7 for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:57:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com) Received: from mojave.worldwide.lemis.com ([216.88.157.130]) by yana.lemis.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA00828; Thu, 23 Mar 2000 05:26:28 +1030 (CST) (envelope-from grog@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by mojave.worldwide.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id KAA01916; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:55:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 10:55:49 -0800 From: Greg Lehey To: Paul Richards Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav , Terry Lambert , Jay Nelson , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: What's in a name? (was: The Merger, and what will its effects be on committers?) Message-ID: <20000322105549.M416@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> Reply-To: Greg Lehey References: <200003171545.IAA16366@usr06.primenet.com> <38D637E0.B9ABBBBB@originative.co.uk> <20000320211849.B522@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> <38D7C5FF.E407F830@originative.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <38D7C5FF.E407F830@originative.co.uk>; from paul@originative.co.uk on Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 06:57:03PM +0000 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tuesday, 21 March 2000 at 18:57:03 +0000, Paul Richards wrote: > Greg Lehey wrote: >> >> On Monday, 20 March 2000 at 14:38:24 +0000, Paul Richards wrote: >>> Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: >>>> >>>> Terry Lambert writes: >>>>> The point is that, if a driver already exists in BSDI, and FreeBSD >>>>> becomes the public shadow of the BSDI source tree, there is very >>>>> little incentive to write a new driver among volunteers, because >>>>> the job has already been done, and there are interesting things to >>>>> write that haven't yet been done. >>>> >>>> Why would FreeBSD become the public shadow of the BSDI source tree? >>>> From what I've read about the merger, the reverse (BSDI becoming the >>>> commercial shadow of FreeBSD) is more likely. >>>> >>>> Let me spell it out for you: BSDI WILL NOT CONTROL FREEBSD. >>>> >>>> Nobody can take arbitrary control of FreeBSD. It's open source. Even >>>> if Jordan, David & co. were to "sell out" to BSDI today, they couldn't >>>> stop committers from finding another place to host the project and >>>> carry on with its development. The worst they can do is stop us from >>>> using the name. >>> >>> Umm, that's more than a little ridiculous. >>> >>> Nobody can stop anyone taking the codebase and lauching another project. >>> If "Jordan, David & co" stop you using the name then what you're doing >>> is setting up a competing project not taking the project somewhere else. >> >> I think this is a matter of definition. Do you consider the project >> to be the name, or the product? Recall that we have already gone >> through a number of names: UNIX, Berkeley UNIX, BSD UNIX, BSD, >> FreeBSD. There's a continuity of product from one to the next. Sure, >> I wouldn't want to drop the BSD name, but then I wasn't too happy when >> we had to drop the UNIX name, either. But we survived. > > Who do you mean by "we". The community that has become FreeBSD. > The only name change that FreeBSD has gone through was from "386BSD > 0.1 Interim" to FreeBSD, which is actually a good example in that > the name change also resulted in a new project since it was > essentially a split from 386BSD in the same way that NetBSD was. If that's where you start, sure. But FreeBSD wasn't written from scratch the way Linux was. It goes back a long way, and that's what I was referring to. > Maybe some definitions would be useful. > > The project is neither the name nor the product. The name could be > changed, if the project felt we should rebrand, and maybe it will > following the merger, perhaps it will be BSD 5.0. Well, I'd go for 5BSD or 5.0BSD. > We could also change the product, say we decided that BSD/OS was > much better and we should just throw FreeBSD's code base away and > use that instead. That's a little at variance with the real intentions. > All the above would still take place within the project structure, with > the core team having executive control and the usual hierarchical peer > structure within the developer community. > > If you split from the project structure though then you are forming a > new project. If you disagree with core's decisions and take the code, > and even many of the developers and go off and do your own thing then > that is a project split. You are forced to change the name of your > product because the core team/foundation own it but it is not the name > that is relevant, it is the setting up of a competing project structure. > This is just like OpenBSD splitting from NetBSD. OK, now let's consider the object of this month's FUD: that BSDI tries to take over FreeBSD and change it beyond recognition. If a *majority* of FreeBSD developers left and formed a "new" project to continue the old tradition, would that be a new project? Is FreeBSD no longer UNIX, just because the lawyers say so? Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message