Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:55:19 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Hiten Pandya <hitmaster2k@yahoo.com>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: IBM suing (was: RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD) Message-ID: <20011213115519.F3448@monorchid.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <3C17482C.3792DAA9@mindspring.com> References: <20011212105559.19177.qmail@web21103.mail.yahoo.com> <3C17482C.3792DAA9@mindspring.com>
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On Wednesday, 12 December 2001 at 4:06:04 -0800, Terry Lambert wrote: > Hiten Pandya wrote: >> why would RMS sue, lets say me, for porting IBM's >> piece of GPL'ed code to FreeBSD src/gnu. > > RMS wouldn't, not being directly involved. IBM might. IBM won't. > I am a former IBM employee, of IBM GSB division (Global Small > Business). I am a current IBM employee, in Ozlabs. One of my areas of activity is JFS. > When the GPL JFS was announced, I tried within IBM for a year to get > the code under other terms for use in an IBM GSB product, > specifically, the InterJet. The people involved were on a > religious/marketing GPL crusade, however. It's pretty certain that IBM will never release proprietary code under the BSD license. This is a stated direction, and it's not a "religious/marketing GPL crusade", it's plain common business sense. IBM has a stated policy to help open source projects, but they're not prepared to release code under conditions which would enable their commercial competitors to take the code, use it, and not return to the community. I certainly understand and support this decision (though it was made quite plain that nobody was requiring me to personally agree with it). > With JFS under non-GPL'ed terms, we wuld have been able to get > perhaps another $120 per unit out of the final end customer cost. > In the U.S., this would have let us drop our subscription cost > $10/month. In Japan, it would have dropped ~20,000 Yen from the > total per unit cost. I'm not going to ask you why this should have such drastic and far-reaching effects, but I'll put on record that I have a hard time believing it. Greg -- 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
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