From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue Dec 4 16:59:42 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from odin.acuson.com (odin.acuson.com [157.226.230.71]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 57F4E37B416 for ; Tue, 4 Dec 2001 16:59:39 -0800 (PST) Received: from acuson.com ([157.226.46.72]) by odin.acuson.com (Netscape Messaging Server 3.54) with ESMTP id AAA68FE; Tue, 4 Dec 2001 16:59:37 -0800 Message-ID: <3C0D7177.542DD45B@acuson.com> Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 16:59:35 -0800 From: David Johnson Organization: Acuson X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Anthony Atkielski Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Prevalence of FreeBSD and UNIX among servers References: <00ef01c17cda$6b419760$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D0426.BEC515D7@dnr.state.ak.us> <010001c17cf4$954228d0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D21CD.7F89C40A@dnr.state.ak.us> <013b01c17d10$cf9c99e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D591E.D33C5BD5@dnr.state.ak.us> <018701c17d25$16c389a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Anthony Atkielski wrote: > > Redhat and Mandrake put most of their early > > work under the GPL. > > Early work, eh? And now? > > > Redhat acquired some companies doing proprietary > > development, but much of their stuff is still > > released under the GPL, as far as I know. > > Uh-huh. The proprietary software included in the Linux distros that have them tend to all fall into one of two categories: installation/maintenance software (YaST) and third party software (Navigator). From my perspective, it's the non-distro projects that are bailing on the Free Software "ideal" (you know, those Ximian guys who hold seats on the FSF board). Will the commercial distros ever go flat-out proprietary in an attempt to lock their users in? Maybe, maybe not. But I know for one thing that the users won't put up with it. > However, once these companies finally make it clear that they are really in it for the money, maybe FreeBSD will become more > popular, at least until someone tries to turn it into a cash cow as well. Any new annoyance with a user's chosen distro and they start looking at other distros and systems, including FreeBSD. These new annoyances can be just about anything, including raising the price of the distro to $80, announcing that they are considering a subscription service, using too much bleeding edge software in the core system, to merely posting a white paper saying that KDE is illegal (the latter caused me to eventually switch to FreeBSD). > > And free software has been around as long as > > software has ... > > But how much free software from the past is still available--and free--today? vi, emacs, BSD, TCP/IP, sendmail, BIND, hetc, etc. Of course, if you're looking for the *really* old free software, like for the Univac or something, it's going to be harder. But basically all of the free software available when I started computing twenty years ago is still there, but with twenty years of improvements and updates. The first computer game I ever liked is still available for free and shipping with FreeBSD: rogue. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message