Date: Tue, 6 Feb 1996 18:10:45 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: ptroot@uswest.com (Paul T. Root) Cc: ian_stewart@nyro.com, questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD be used in a commercial way? Message-ID: <199602070110.SAA04120@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <9602062137.AA02506@kermit.acs.uswest.com> from "Paul T. Root" at Feb 6, 96 03:37:33 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> It is a complete OS. You you can't sell it. You > can sell the value. Which could be packaging > or support or something like that. Walnut Creek > has great packaging. The guys on this list have > great support. Sorry, but wrong. You *can* sell it. What you can't sell is some of the Copyright Walnut Creek CDROM code on the CDROM for doing installation. The ability to sell it is *intentional* in the use of the UCB copyright. We would be perfectly happy (I think I speak for most of us) if all the System V vendors in the world started selling FreeBSD instead. I think it's the collective opinion that if this happened, there would still be significant benefit to the vendors rolling their changes back to the main line source tree (for anything but packaging). This is true because it's likely that a vendor who repackaged the product with hardware or their own software would want to take advanatage of changes put into the main tree, as well as leveraging the net and lists for support. Consider: if you as a vendor made a fix to, say, the SIO driver, and you didn't donate the fix back, there would be a rapidly diverging source base from where you got your code cut. With each rev in the main source line of the affected files, your ability to integrate is lessened. In general, 500 volunteers can cause more changes than a small group of paid employees. 8-). Unless you want to freeze at a particular rev or deal with geometrically increasing update conflicts, you donate back. It's good business sense. But the decision is not forced: you can in fact sell everything but the GPL'ed pieces (and you can exclude them or give them away). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199602070110.SAA04120>