Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 17:28:01 -0400 From: Joshua Lee <yid@softhome.net> To: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Has the foretold fragmentation of Linux begun? Message-ID: <20020819172801.3225b81f.yid@softhome.net> In-Reply-To: <20020819155109.GC89852@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> References: <20020819155109.GC89852@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 16:51:09 +0100 Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> wrote: > I think it's interesting that we have Red Hat, United Linux (with the > LSB stamp?), and now Sun rolling their own. Red Hat and some of the United Linux vendors (SuSE and Caldera) all managed to get the LSB certification. However, unless there were some big changes in some of these distributions (SuSE was pretty close to the LSB spec, but the others weren't) that is a pretty meaningless spec. Apparantly the folks who administer the LSB got tired of waiting for the major distributions to be complient and announced that everyone on the advisory panel was already complient. I'll believe that you can install any Red Hat RPM on SuSE and vice versa when I see it; knowing Red Hat their upcoming 8.0 version will break compatability with 7.x RPMs of their own distribution, let alone somebody else's. > It seems that this was part of the plan all along of these big > corporations, and this could lead to the exact same kind of > fragmentation that brought down Unix in the first place. > > Will the GPL help, hinder, or be irrelevant to prevent this? I think the GPL is pretty irrelevant to this, it doesn't seem to either encourage or prevent forks. As long as you make source code available of your changes you've fulfilled it AFAIK. (I happen to like the BSD license better from a philosophical standpoint, because I'm not religious about the existence of closed-source applications, but I don't think that it makes forks less likely than GPL - on the contrary forks have basically no resistance. However, the GPL doesn't provide much resistance to forks either in practice.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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