Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 22:29:42 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: devnull@gnu.org (Joel N. Weber II) Cc: toor@dyson.iquest.net, cmott@srv.net, julian@whistle.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD based box wins prize at COMDEX! Message-ID: <199711180329.WAA00572@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199711180255.VAA23383@melange.gnu.org> from "Joel N. Weber II" at "Nov 17, 97 09:55:37 pm"
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Joel N. Weber II said: <IMO> > > Of course, there have been efforts made to avoid the GPL restrictions. > I don't have a problem with that - but I really do have a problem with those who do so violating the license. I am a stickler on trying to follow license terms. > > For example, I believe that Cygnus was rather upset that Wind River Systems > made a proprietary X11 front end to gdb that wasn't linked against gdb, > so it didn't have to be GPL'd. > I wonder why Cygnus was upset? If I wrote a very fancy GUI environment for XFree86/Linux, that everyone loved, and that environment used only POSIX interfaces, that work also wouldn't necessarily need to come under the GPL. To me, that is pretty obvious. Using proprietary (Linux-specific) internal interfaces, things might get more complicated. > > Cygnus has been writing some proprietary > software in recent times, too. > That is good too. (IMO) There is room for both free and proprietary software. I can imagine cases where free software isn't worth it for a commercial company to keep private, or perhaps there is PR value in release software to the free community. However, I can't agree that every thing that a company does has to be free. I don't know all of the financials associated with Cygnus, but assuming that Cygnus bootstrapped itself up by selling services associated with free software, that certainly doesn't mean that it must continue to do free software solely. It is fortunate that Cygnus continues to contribute to the free software base, though. I would not dislike Cygnus if they ever decided to quit doing free software, just like I would not dislike any other free software contributor, if they quit contributing. > > But the GPL has had the effect that lots of enhancements that people have > made to gcc did become freely avaiable to everyone. > I do think that GPL for GCC and development tools isn't nearly the problem that it is for runtime code. GCC isn't the best compiler possible, but is pretty darned good (I am very happy to see the EGCS effort, where the "GCC" effort is becoming more open, and the effort appears to be revitalized.) There is still room for commercial high-end compilers, and other pretty good free compilers, but GCC is a great default. (And an impressive effort.) (I am not as critical of it now, since I see some X86 progress :-)). > > The Objective C front-end for gcc is free only because of the GPL. > NeXT decided to use gcc because it was technically superior to the > propreitary compilers (they were willing to pay lots of money if that > was necissary), but they actually tried shipping the compiler without > linking it, having the customer do the final linking. Obviously, this > scheme didn't work, and RMS used the GPL to force them to share the > source. > That says that it might have been true that OBJC wouldn't have been free, if NeXT understood the license terms, and was initially planning to comply with those terms. I don't know the whole story, but the above example shows that it is possible that NeXT would have gone with a non-GPLed, commercial and propietary compiler, given GPL was properly figured in to their plans. The community is learning what GPL means and what other free license terms really mean. It is probably unlikely that mistake will be made again. (In a way, I think that it is great that OBJC was freed, but from another viewpoint, I sure hope that the programmers and project leaders properly informed mgmt of their decision, and the decision was made at the correct level in the company.) Forcing someone into a position of giving something up by putting them into a tricky legal position is not a good practice. It is more likely than not that the OBJC situation was just a mistake, and it is possible that NeXT would have decided to use GCC anyway. Geesh, I even read the licenses for Microsoft software, and the fonts I just purchased. It is easy and seductive to ignore licenses -- so I don't do that. > > I think > that using the free market, with the public knowledge that the company > contributes-back is a vastly superior alternative. > > That is true, but most companies that release commerical products seem to > not be responsible. > I think that is changing. My employer (NCI, the Oracle venture) has told me to include any kernel changes that I make for them into FreeBSD (if the rest of the user base agrees.) There are some userland things that will not be included, but a significant amount of OS related software will be. It appears that Whistle is taking a similar position. There is a possibility that certain innovations won't be included into the FreeBSD kernel, either due to the user community rejecting it, or perhaps I might suggest that NCI keep it proprietary. The former is more likely than the latter, though. </IMO> -- John dyson@freebsd.org jdyson@nc.com
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