Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 10:59:15 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> Cc: wes@softweyr.com (Wes Peters), advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: license (no longer Re: uptimes, Woo Hoo) Message-ID: <12894.947271555@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 07 Jan 2000 08:10:07 EST." <200001071310.IAA17308@blackhelicopters.org>
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> I'm pretty much surrounded by Linux bigots. Their big pro-Linux > argument that they have is the GPL, and how it's great for the > community. > > So, is there any highfalutin' purpose behind the BSDL? Or is it as > nonpolitical as it appears to be? Having had this argument many > times, I'd like something better than "we don't care"; from an > advocacy point of view, that never comes across well. The "highfalutin'" purpose behind the BSDL, if it can even lay claim to such a thing, is that We Have No Frickin' Idea where this industry or its programmers are all going and the only constant in all of this is the code we manage to leave behind in the course of our evolution as an industry. Now, if you want to be able to leverage all that code in an evolving industry, you need maximum flexibility on its license so that taking the code from place A to place B doesn't result in place B's legal team going "aieeeee!" and holding up your progress. If I could write my own licenses as "I wrote this. Don't sue me. Thank you" then that's probably as long as they'd be for that very reason. The longer and more convoluted a legal license is, the more it narrows your options to only that set of people who are receptive to those particular convolutions. Eventually, I'm sure, it would be possible to arrive at a 50 page license which only one person in the entire world was happy with if you pursued that to its logical extreme in the other direction. :-) This is not to say that nobody is happy with the GPL, I know many people are, but I've never seen anyone *unhappy* with the BSD license whereas I cannot say the same for the GPL, so I'd be secure in saying that it's the wider of two "fan outs" as far as public opinion is concerned. The BSD license's greatest "problems", in fact, seem to be a lack of awareness about it in the general public and a lot of FUD-spreading from folks who predict doom and exploitation if you leave your license that open. The fact that the emergence of SunOS and BSD/OS from BSD *long ago* did nothing to harm the parallel efforts of BSD at UCB (and other places) seems to be wasted on these folks. Their arguments that BSD/OS and SunOS (and Ultrix and ...) would all be free right now if only the BSD kernel had been GPL'd are similarly hallucinogenic since they completely ignore the corporate culture of the early 80's and the fact that if the BSD code base HAD been GPL'd, you'd have never seen it in SunOS or Ultrix at all. Instead, those companies would have gone off and rolled their own operating systems from scratch or licensed System III from Bell Labs and pursued (a far weaker) SVR4 line from the same group. I say SVR4 would have been a weaker line since it also wouldn't have taken in all that BSD code if the aformentioned code had been poison-pilled by the GPL, leaving us all with far less palatable solutions to work with. We may consider Sun or Digital to be "the commercial competition", but we also often have to use their products and I, for one, would have been a much sadder man if my Sun days had been spent on a SYSV-derived box with no job control, long filenames or vi and a VM system which performed poorly at best. The fact that I was able to spend those years using SunOS and Ultrix makes me very very glad that the U.C. Regents chose the license that they did. Now if we could only get microsoft to "steal" the BSD TCP/IP stack for Windows 2000 more throughly than they have to date (just run 'strings' on windows telnet someday, for example :), maybe we wouldn't all be cursing our connections dropping on transient network misbehavior every time we got stuck using a Win2K box. But I digress. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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