Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 09:16:52 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com>, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD Message-ID: <20010418091652.A27000@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <006701c0c7d5$65e45c40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:01:31AM -0700 References: <3ADCDCA7.A01F5F40@acuson.com> <006701c0c7d5$65e45c40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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Ted Mittelstaedt said on Apr 18, 2001 at 00:01:31: > In every corporate acquisition there's always bits that don't > fit and eventually get cut off. This is a natural part of > this process. > > The fact is that it's illegal to buy and sell people like cattle, > and while you can buy and sell products all you want, your > never guarenteed that just because you buy a product that > all the employees are going to choose to go to work for you. > This is a difficult problem for software companies particularly, > since most of the company's value is in the butts of the people > warming the chairs in the cubicles, not in the end results of > those folks. > > I think that you can't fault Windriver for this, because their > only legal option was to sell the Slackware product to someone, I agree that it's difficult, in principle, to fault them for it. Nevertheless, I was uneasy about the takeover and what it means for FreeBSD, and this news will make many people uneasy if they weren't already. Because Wind River's only motivation is to be able to close the source if they want to. Another bit of uneasy news was Apple's threatening a Mac theme editor, http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=2773 Note that this is quite different from threatening themes.org: this editor was for creating themes for *MacOS itself*. FreeBSD people justify the ability of Apple, Wind River et al to commercialise BSD, by saying that these companies do contribute back to the original source. Maybe individual people at Apple play nice, but Apple the company has never played nice. Their hardware has always been closed; they sued Microsoft for Windows, claiming it copies their GUI (which they themselves had lifted from Xerox); they have recently been claiming the idea of theming. Consider the following scenario: Apple has a patent on some very low-level algorithm, but doesn't tell people. (They do claim a patent on theming, so why not on some OS-related thing?) Their people (no doubt well-meaning) contribute it to FreeBSD. It gets into -current, then into a stable release, becomes well entrenched into the OS. Then the legal people at Apple decide that FreeBSD has no right to distribute this patented stuff for free, and threaten to sue. I'm not being paranoid here. People may individually play nice, but one should never assume that corporations will play nice. Or that, if they're playing nice today, they will play nice tomorrow. Their personality depends entirely on who's in charge. It's the money, and the money only. While Wind River is not Apple, it seems to me that they too would have a motivation for trying to close FreeBSD, perhaps through some such underhand way. If they contribute any really useful technology to the system, they would not want other companies to be able to make use of it. - Rahul. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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