Date: Sun, 03 May 1998 16:31:37 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Nicole <freelist@webweaver.net> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG, FreeBSD advocacy list <FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: InfoWorld Electric: Linux Zealots Trashing FreeBSD, Berkeley Message-ID: <199805032231.QAA25472@lariat.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980503144012.freelist@webweaver.net> References: <199805030318.VAA15026@lariat.lariat.org>
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>I have heard one good argument against the FreeBSD liscense altho I don't know h >ow true it is.. > > Their agument was that the license would allow someone (like M$) to take Freebs >d and add some propritary stuff to it (like Front page extensions, active X etc) > and sell it without having to give anything back to the FreeBSD group or even s >tate that it was FreeBSD. > > >Any comments? > > Nicole This argument has been refuted many times. As has been pointed out in other forums, Microsoft has the money to reimplement anything it wants! For instance, while Microsoft could have used the BSD TCP/IP stack (as IBM did for OS/2 and NeXT did for NeXTStep), it didn't; it rolled its own. The restrictions on commercial re-use of source found in the GPL don't hurt Microsoft one bit. Failure to allow commercial re-use of code never bothers the "big guys," like Microsoft, which can drop a few million without breaking a sweat and hire programmers to "rewrite the wheel." (Heck, they can buy a whole company that has what they want.) And actually LIKE it if their stuff turns out to be just a bit incompatible; it locks users in. But the little guy -- the upstart competitor -- will lose valuable time reimplementing what's already been done. I think we'd all prefer to free innovators to concentrate on what's innovative and new, rather than having to start from scratch when a problem has already been solved. The result is likely to be of higher quality -- and more compatible, too. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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