Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 11:15:26 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD Message-ID: <20010418111526.A3210@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <20010418091652.A27000@lpt.ens.fr>; from rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in on Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 09:16:52AM %2B0200 References: <3ADCDCA7.A01F5F40@acuson.com> <006701c0c7d5$65e45c40$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <20010418091652.A27000@lpt.ens.fr>
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Hello,
I did not mean to chime in to this thread initially, but now I saw
something which resonated with what I feel a bit concerned about wrt this
whole commercially-backed-open-source thing, not only necessarily this
particular incident.
On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 09:16:52AM +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> 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.
While I do not subscribe to conspiracy theory side of the matter (I do not
think they would want to "close" the source by "underhand ways" nor can
they do it even if they want to) I see a potential problem here.
Even though an OpenSource project's code cannot be taken away (one fear
that is often voiced and supposedly solved by the GPL, but one fear that
just shows how far people are from understanding the way the legal system
in general and copyright law in particular works), it is today's reality,
that every OpenSource project needs some large backer who will donate
hardware, bandwith, employ key deveopers etc if it wants to become even a
bit more than just "yet another sexy text editor" on SourceForge. This
backer need not necessarily be a company that deals in similar matters as
the project itself (like BSDi) need not even be a company at all, but may
be a government agency (like the NSA for their Linux distro) or a
university etc. While it can be argued that by nature the best sponsors are
non-profit entities, and this has been grandly demonstrated by the UCB's
commitment to BSD, today most such sponsors are corps, and often corps who
want to have something in return ie want this support to "pay off" for
their for-profit operations.
If one such backer dumps an OpenSource project, be it because of a mergers
& acquisitions game or for difference of opinion or whatever, the code
remains and the developers have lost nothing in theory. But in practice...
unless they can find a new sponsor, the project is as good as dead.
Software development on such world-wide scale as is the case with FreeBSD,
(but not only) simply requires a world-class infrastructure. It needs the
powerful FTP, CVS, cvsup servers, the many mirrors, the direct backbone
connectivity, the paid developers. Theoretically the Internet has made
everybody equal in that you can start a sw project from a homepage hosted
at Geocities, but in practice this approach does not scale, is only suited
for one-man-shows. In the Net's infancy, when almost everybody was
connected to the Net directly and every node could very well be a server as
well as a client, this approach might have been true, but a lot has
happened since then. (Unfortunately, if you ask me)
What I am nervous about is that by becoming too dependent on the commercial
sponsors, you are really at their whim. If you do not have one, you'll end
up like NetBSD who have one Wasabi and that's it, or even worse, like
OpenBSD, who have nobody and it shows. An uneasy situation and one where
it's understandable that people get anxious when news of take-overs and
such float around, esp since it wasn't such a long time ago when we had to
get accustomed to the WCCDROM/BSDi merger.
Just my HUF 0.02...
--
Regards:
Szilveszter ADAM
Szeged University
Szeged Hungary
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