Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 10:43:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org> To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: BSD, GPL, the world today. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990513102928.2143A-100000@beelzebubba.sysabend.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I've been doing a little thinking on the whole Proprietary vs. GPL vs. BSD licensing issue. Stallman's wrong, Brett's wrong, Gates iswrong, hell everyobody's wrong. Now that I have your attention, let me continue. The biggest problem I see with software today, as an admin (read, bridge between users and vendors), is the refusal of vedors to take responsibilty for their products. Microsoft seems to be the biggest practitioner of this, but they didn't start it. For a free product to offer no warrnaty of suitability it perfectly understandable. For commercial software, it should be totally unacceptable. Unfortunately, it's the norm. Everyday, vendors release software that's broken in some way or other. Fine, I know there is no such thing as bug free software. The vendor's refusal to fix their product without 'buying' the upgrade is unacceptable. Again, Microsoft seems to be the biggest practitioner of this, and as the largest OS vendor on the planet, fosters it in others. How can Caldera, or Ipswitch, or Oracle guarantee their products whey then run on top of faulty software? They can't. Someone with lots of free time and money needs to go after Gates and company for failure to deliver. I don't care what the EULA reads, I don't seriously believe they can knowingly sell and refuse to fix a faulty product and get away with it anymore than GM can. Just because it doesn't result in fiery crashes doesn't make it any better (although, with MS going after the embedded systems market, even this may not be true much longer). You lost a relative due to faulty parts, I lost millions due to faulty software. Everyone lost. Everyone is losing. FreeBSD, the other BSD's, and Linux all have someone's reputation riding on them, which seems to be a deciding factor in bugs getting hammered into the ground as they get found. Commercial software offers no such public billboard as to who wrote that horrible bit of code. It's a shame really. Microsoft Tech. Support tells you to upgrade, it'll be fixed, while their fearless leader is simultaneously saying upgrades are for features, not bug fixes, and that no one would upgrade just to fix bugs. I think perhaps he is so lost to the needs of his customers and reality in general that he can no longer speak for them. Money will do that. Oh well, I suppose I'm done ranting for now. Jamie Bowden -- If we've got to fight over grep, sign me up. But boggle can go. -Ted Faber (on Hasbro's request for removal of /usr/games/boggle) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.96.990513102928.2143A-100000>