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Date:      Wed, 28 Feb 2001 07:13:32 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        riel@conectiva.com.br (Rik van Riel)
Cc:        brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), dcs@newsguy.com (Daniel C. Sobral), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jar@integratus.com (Jack Rusher), sam@errno.com (Sam Leffler), zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu (Zhiui Zhang), freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Design a journalled file system
Message-ID:  <200102280713.AAA18761@usr05.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0102271739130.5502-100000@duckman.distro.conectiva> from "Rik van Riel" at Feb 27, 2001 05:41:43 PM

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> 3. however, improvements to the code will be available to
>    everbody; nobody will be able to take away IBM's market
>    using an improved version of their product -- IBM itself
>    will also have the improved code  (different from BSD)

If JFS improvents are created, they are under the GPL, since
they are a derivative work of code under that license, and
thus IBM can not roll them back into OS/2, unless they release
OS/2 under GPL.  The same for XFS, SGI, and IRIX.  Neither of
these are possible, since, among other vendors, both OSs
contain code licensed from Microsoft.

Believe me, they are not expecting contributions from the
community, other than bug fixes and porting.

If the license were friendly to commercial use on either one
of them, then it would be only a matter of time before a BSD
using company paid a professional programmer to do something
more than bug fixes and porting work.  Most likely, the code
would be released back out to offload maintenance, since it
wouldn't constitute a huge intellectual property investment.

I made these arguments to vice presidents of engineering in
both companies.  The only reason the code was released was
marketing climbing onto the Linux bandwagon.


> Can you really blame them for chosing this option ?

Yes.  As a stockholder, I can.  The MPL would have been a
much better commercial choice, since it would have given
the company the right to roll changes back into its
commercial product, instead of having to recreate them to
avoid back-contamination.

As a BSD user, the LGPL would have been a better choice.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.

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