From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue May 4 16:37:17 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from peach.ocn.ne.jp (peach.ocn.ne.jp [210.145.254.87]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E7DE15141 for ; Tue, 4 May 1999 16:37:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dcs@newsguy.com) Received: from newsguy.com by peach.ocn.ne.jp (8.9.1a/OCN) id IAA27106; Wed, 5 May 1999 08:35:29 +0900 (JST) Message-ID: <372F83BC.597F33F7@newsguy.com> Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 08:33:16 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: pt-BR,ja MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai , advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Kris Kennaway Subject: Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > > But to push this "my product is better than yours" thing to the > licensing is surely going a bit too far... There are a lot of people who choose BSD-license based OS because they prefer the BSD license. Heck, some people can't even *choose* a GPL license, because it would restrict them in ways that would make their business impossible. Are you asking us not to say that for some people the main (and sometimes *only*) reason for going FreeBSD instead of Linux is the license issue? > Historical note: the GPL was created by one Richard Stallman, who > believes that any restrictions on software For all I know Ricard Stallman could believe in Santa Claus. The person behind the license is irrelevant, what is relevant is what the license *IS*. Besides, that's not RMS belief. He believes in software that *CANNOT* (as in *restriction*) have it's source closed. > modification/redistribution is unethical. From that point of > view, the GPL is the best solution and a phenomenally successful > one. So to blast the GPL for being business-unfriendly just Eh? I don't follow your logic here. > doesn't make sense. Besides, businesses do make money from GPL'd > code -- Cygnus, Red Hat, etc, etc -- and Stallman himself is > certainly all for it. I see a lot of people making money selling other's people software. I also see a lot of hardware manufacturers making money by selling their hardware with Linux (which could have had _any_ license, as long as it got as much publicity as it have right now -- saying you support Linux is the easiest way to gain free advertisement nowadays). Would you mind filling in who are making money by selling _their own_ software GPLed? -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org "Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness if that _none_ of his predictions have come true yet." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message