Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 02:19:41 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: I'm outta here Message-ID: <199902230719.CAA02615@y.dyson.net> In-Reply-To: <199902230448.UAA05278@kithrup.com> from Sean Eric Fagan at "Feb 22, 99 08:48:20 pm"
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Sean Eric Fagan said: > For the past six weeks, this list has consisted of almost nothing but > the twit brett's whines about linux and the GPL. > > Here's a clue for all the needful: anytime you need to build yourself > up by attacking some other person, entity, or project, you're along the > path of failure. > I truely agree. However, GPL has done so, by demonizing the notion of owning your creations, especially if derived from other GPLed works. (Why is proprietary bad? It is a choice... Proprietary works create an excellent opportunity of making a fair profit, which can be used to pay bills, feed kids, help poor people, etc.) It seems that the GPL demonizes ownership of ideas, expensively created (esp when derived from GPLed works :-))... However, it is not the *purpose* of all GPL authors (but only some) to demonize others who might have to spend months or years on creations. It is only a side-effect in many cases, and has made progress partially because it has been a default license of choice. FreeBSD has to base itself on it's quality (by whatever measure), but there are LOTS of types of quality. One kind of quality is freedom of use, modification and redistribution by those who get a copy of FreeBSD. There are areas where other OSes have better quality than FreeBSD, but FreeBSD has to learn to capitalize better (in a figurative sense) on it's advantages. Sometimes comparison is very difficult without showing the flaws that FreeBSD doesn't have (for certain large classes of users and customers.) It would be wonderful if the common knowledge about licenses was more accurate, and more information was common knowledge, but that is just not true. Since this is a FreeBSD list, it seems that strategizing might be sometimes (but not incessantly) appropriate here. It does seem that flaming isn't productive though, and there doesn't really seem like there has been a lot of that recently. Maybe some people have more zeal than others, and if (zeal <= Stallmanzeal) or (zeal <= newLinuxUser), what is wrong with that? :-). Sure, it might not be optimal, but where in this world are things even nearly optimal? -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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