Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 00:46:15 -0400 From: "Thomas M. Sommers" <tms2@mail.ptd.net> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The desktop apathy? I think not. Message-ID: <3B171E17.348C44E5@mail.ptd.net> References: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0105312004160.290-100000@pilchuck.reedmedia.net>
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"Jeremy C. Reed" wrote: > > On Thu, 31 May 2001, Thomas M. Sommers wrote: > > > Had gcc been under a BSD license, it would have been just as deadly. > > Sure, a company could have made proprietary changes to it, and tried to > > sell it, but who would buy it? Or, to put it another way, how much > > could they have charged for it and still sell some? The fate of BSDi > > shows how difficult it is to sell proprietary versions of BSD-licensed > > software (at least on commodity hardware). > > One example is not enough. (Anyways I don't see the fate of BSD/OS.) Presumably it (BSD/OS) would not have been sold if it had been more than marginally profitable. (Of course, this is just a presumption; I have no inside information.) > Now look at all the proprietary routers, firewalls, UNIX operating systems > and various other software that are based on BSD licensed code and are > succesfully sold. It is one thing to incorporate BSD-licensed code in a larger product, and quite another to try to sell a proprietary version of a free product. Also note that I referred to commodity hardware; selling BSD-licensed code in conjuction with proprietary hardware would be much easier. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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