Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 21:32:40 -0400 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> Cc: Mark Ovens <mark@ukug.uk.freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Threat to FreeBSD in Europe? Message-ID: <20040515013240.GA1199@online.fr> In-Reply-To: <6.1.0.6.1.20040514095157.03e2a4d0@popserver.sfu.ca> References: <40A48806.101@ukug.uk.freebsd.org> <6.1.0.6.1.20040514095157.03e2a4d0@popserver.sfu.ca>
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Colin Percival said on May 14, 2004 at 10:02:05: > At 09:49 14/05/2004, Mark Ovens wrote: > >http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/05/13/1447225.shtml?tid=132&tid=150&tid=82 > > FreeBSD is thriving in the US. Suggesting that the EU adopting US-style > patent rules would threaten FreeBSD is consequently ironic at best. > Free Software has been riding on the coat-tails of commercial software > for far too long, and this article is just an attempt by Mandrakesoft > to preserve their ability to do that. No, this is an attempt to avoid a future where all European software developers (free or otherwise) will have to spend their time and effort dodging patents for idiotic "innovations" like the XOR cursor and Amazon's one-click shopping. True, they have to dodge such patents anyway if they want a piece of the US market. That doesn't mean Europe should introduce similar rules too. > Wake up guys; if Free Software is going to succeed, it has to innovate > for itself. And, whatever some people may think, looking at someone else's > wheel, building your own, and then giving it away for free does not > constitute innovation. I think you have it backwards. Many of the "wheels" moved from BSD to commercial software, rather than the other way around. Increasingly, commercial unix is picking up free software "wheels" like GNOME/KDE/Mozilla and (in an earlier generation) GNU Emacs. And I still wish the GNU readline library was more widespread in the commercial world (or the non-GPL free software world, for that matter). Unfortunately, RMS knew how useful it was and deliberately licensed it under the GPL rather than the LGPL. In a similar situation (seeing something good in proprietary-land), the free software community would have reinvented it; not a single commercial company has done that, and if you're used to it in GNU software, command-line editing becomes a torture on any commercial unix or any non-GPL software package. (Come to think of it, python does have very readline-like capabilities, and groks my .inputrc, but doesn't seem to be linked to the readline library and isn't GPL-licensed. Perhaps they did reinvent that particular wheel.) Rahul
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