Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 19:01:14 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: Don Wilde <Don@Silver-Lynx.com>, Anders Nordby <anders@fix.no>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, core@daemonnews.org Subject: Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together" Message-ID: <20010518190114.E7708@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <002101c0df56$e6c62260$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Thu, May 17, 2001 at 09:56:29PM -0700 References: <20010518112834.I55915@wantadilla.lemis.com> <002101c0df56$e6c62260$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] > X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2173.0 > X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 Your MUA makes its own, incorrect decisions about line breaks. On Thursday, 17 May 2001 at 21:56:29 -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > On Thursday, May 17, 2001 6:59 PM, Greg Lehey wrote: >> On Thursday, 17 May 2001 at 8:29:51 -0600, Don Wilde wrote: >>> Anders Nordby wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> I'm a little dissatisfied with the fact that it seems Bruce Perens >>>> doesn't seem to want to include any BSD persons on a list of "free >>>> software leaders". Is he really that much of a zealot, and does he lack >>>> history knowledge? Or is it just me that got this all wrong? Did he >>>> actually ask any BSD persons? >>>> >>> He says quite clearly that he is focusing on GPL. That's his right. >>> There's nothing stopping us from doing likewise. He obviously believes >>> the GPL is a "better" license. Perhaps we can ask Chris Coleman to add a >>> page to DaemonNews.org with a simple PHP/MySQL sign-up so that we can >>> _all_ add our signatures and e-mails to such a letter. Come to think of >>> it, this would probably be a great way to tell how many users *BSD >>> actually has... >> >> *sigh* Bruce seems to be apprehensive about our reaction. In his >> words, we should "stand together", not set up our own reaction. I've >> replied to the thread in this vein. > > As well he should be. Remember, Bruce is the person who explicitly > recommended _against_ developers using the BSD license, when he > originally copyrighted the term "Open Source". It wasn't until the > Regents of the University of California explictly stated that the > UCB copyright didn't need to be displayed that Bruce couldn't find > any more excuses to recommend against the BSD license, and changed > the recommendations to be more neutral. What's wrong in that? I'm a little surprised how much the advertising clause worried the GPL faction, but then I'm very surprised how much the GPL worries the BSD faction. > The real issues go a lot deeper and if you go back several years in > history you can see what is going on. Simply put, the so-called > "leaders of the GPL" movement are engaged in a war of words and in > media manipulation in an attempt to equate "Free Software" and "Open > Source" directly with the GPL. 2 years ago esr showed me the draft of a book he was writing. It doesn't seem to have come out, or at least I haven't seen it. He compared free software licenses, and explicitly stated that the BSD license was the freest of all. > They do NOT like the BSD license, and particularly don't like > FreeBSD, (both because FreeBSD is the flagship of the BSD license, Saying things like that will alienate not only the GPL people, but also the other BSDs. > and because FreeBSD uses the term "Free" in it's name thus causing > problems for their little doublespeak game of attempting to equate > GPL and Open Source) I don't think they're that naive. > Basically, what has happened is that Bruce and his friends (the > signatories on the list of that article are a who's who of them) > have literally made millions of dollars out of in effect convincing > a bunch of developers to GPL their code, then those Open Source > people have set themselves up in the only point in the GPL code > distributon scheme (the nexus points) where it's possible to make a > lot of money. You're putting it as if they were a united front. They are not. The three I know (rms, esr and Tim O'Reilly) all have very different viewpoints on the issue. rms and esr have both repeatedly stated: a: The BSD license is good ("but the GPL is better"). b: (esr): "Free Software" is a term which just doesn't fly. (rms): "Open Source" is a betrayal of everything free software stands for. > VA Linux, Red Hat, and all of those distributors, all of their > business models are the same - at one end they suck in GPL code and > at the other end spit out finished UNIX-like distributions, and make > money doing it. They're not making money doing it. They're *trying* to make money doing it. > Notice that I said they suck in GPL code - they don't really have > interest in pointing their suckers at BSD code. Yes they do. At least Red Hat does. But they have enough problems now without getting involved with another set. > For their business models to continue to work, they must continue to > convince an ever-larger number of Open Source developers to write > GPL code. Why? > In the BSD arena, the money-making is a lot different. The people > in BSD making millions are doing it by including BSD code in > finished products. In our world, the things that matter are > finished products like Whistler Whistle. > Interjet, and the embedded stuff that Wind River is doing, because > those projects untimately spew code back into the BSD distribution. My understanding from Wind River is that their interest in FreeBSD is of a different nature. I'm not at liberty to say how, but this statement doesn't match. > In BSD-land, you don't have people making millions of dollars > primariarly off of repackaging the BSD distribution. You don't in Linux-land either. That's why the Linux companies are going broke. > The GPL people see folks like Microsoft rightly as their antithesis > - but the fact that Microsoft themselves uses a fair bit of BSD code > _themselves_ in their own products isn't lost on the Linux people. It is on most of them. And I think it's pretty irrelevant myself. > So, you can see why GPL is very uneasy with BSD. They see the GPL > as in direct opposition to commercial software license. They see > the BSD license as not being in direct opposition to commercial > software, and in fact they see that there is a symbiosis between BSD > and commercial software, even between BSD and Microsoft, if you can > believe it. Take the Hotmail situation for example - where do you > think that Microsoft got all THE IDEAS to stuff into Windows 2K to > enable it to REPLACE FreeBSD? Certainly NOT by studying Linux, I > can tell you that. You just need to look at the way they did it to know they also didn't get the ideas from BSD UNIX. > Instead, Microsoft spent years studying the BSD way of doing things, > looked at the new web technologies like PHP and so on that were > coming down the pike, and emulated those in Win2K. I can't see any evidence of this. > So, it's kind of a "friend of my enemy is my enemy" What I see in > the future, is I see Microsoft porting MS Office to MacOS X - which > is a hell of a lot closer to BSD then it is to Linux. I also see > that as Microsoft continues to build the case against GPL and > propgandize against it, that they are increasingly going to be > holding up BSD as the "right" way to do Open Source. No wonder that > the Linux GPL people are drawing the line in the sand now between > BSD and GPL. They see the future and they know that ultimately, the > GPL is just as "un-free" as a closed source license like > Microsoft's. Increasingly, their aims and goals are going to be > different than ours. Certainly if we take your viewpoint. You've made a lot of claims there, but I don't see much substantiation, and the viewpoints are very different from what I've experienced first-hand. I work with some leading Linux people, and while there are many things I don't like about Linux, I can't see anything like what you're claiming here. In addition, I don't see any suggestions from you about what to do about the situation. Greg -- When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the original text. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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