From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jul 27 11:52:23 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom1-209.telepath.com [216.14.1.209]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 034F737BB6B for ; Thu, 27 Jul 2000 11:52:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 2104 invoked by uid 100); 27 Jul 2000 18:52:14 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14720.34014.697453.105233@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 13:52:14 -0500 (CDT) To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: BSDI & FreeBSD In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > A good example of the absolute freedom of the BSD code base is that it WAS > taken private at one point by BSDI, which has recently merged back with > CDROM.COM and which shared a lot of code with the FreeBSD project. BSDI was > offering a lot of support, and was what made them viable in the market. It's a lot more complex than that, and BSDI deserves a lot more credit than that. The BSD code base started life with AT&T copyrights on it. While their version had a BSD-style copyright on it, you weren't allowed to have a copy unless you had an AT&T license for the original code. Most - if not all - commercial Unix distributions include BSD code, so in that sense they "took it private". Even those using pure BSD paid for the appropriate AT&T licenses, and passed that on to their customers. BSDI could have taken the same route - but instead they released a product that wasn't encumbered by AT&T's license. AT&T sued them, and they put up with a lot of pain in fighting that, and deserve a lot of credit for doing so. That code base this fight was over was the code base for the *BSDs, so you figure out where FreeBSD would have been without this lawsuit.