Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 02:47:13 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Gert Cuykens" <gert.cuykens@gmail.com>, <tm4525@aol.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: GPL vs BSD Licence Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNGEIOEPAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <ef60af0904102621581a7ca002@mail.gmail.com>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Gert Cuykens > Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 9:59 PM > To: tm4525@aol.com > Cc: questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: GPL vs BSD Licence > > > If you buy a product what would you want ? A pretty box or pretty > software ? Finishing the product is just marketing and trying to make > a very pretty box to put the software in. No, not exactly. It's more than just a box and marketing. It is support also. > When something is open > source and you want to sell it you are forced to make it the best > peace of code out there. Or, you are forced to provide support for it. Or both. > Its what i call healthy competition. For me > open source translates into "If you think you can do better be my > guest" Finishing a product and making it closed source is just plain > wrong. Its like stealing from the church basket. Every body shares > something and you want to take it and keep it for your self. > Perhaps this is true in some cases, but not all. Take for example the development of the TCP/IP stack. When BSD came out with TCP/IP networking, there were a lot of companies that "finished" it and then made their finished product closed-source. But, if you think about it, this WASN'T a bad thing! In fact, it was a very good thing! Because what this did is it created a situation where practically all vendor's implementations of TCP/IP worked very well with each other. This of course, promoted the rapid spread of TCP/IP, which gave UNIX a big leg up. It is fair to say I think that if the Internet had been developed around some other protocol than TCP/IP that was NOT native to UNIX, that we would not see the prevalence of UNIX webservers on the Internet that we do. I think that in MOST cases, even the people that finish an open source product then sell it and keep their mods to themselves, they are contributing back to the open source. Granted much less than people who share. But, the fact that the product exists at all helps the open source package. When Apple selected FreeBSD as the base for Darwin and MacOS X, it gave a huge amount of legitimacy to FreeBSD. Most of the major FreeBSD developers went to work for Apple, as a matter of fact, and while Apple didn't contribute a flood of code back into FreeBSD, I am sure that a goodly amount of FreeBSD development that we don't know about takes place on Apple company time. But, it helps because if you go in today to pitch a FreeBSD solution, bringing up the Apple tie can help you to get the deal. Also, many MacOS users who graduated to MacOS X once they got over the initial learning curve of the operating system, they have got more interested in UNIX. I would suspect that we will see some of those folks start to make some contributions back to FreeBSD or to UNIX software in general. And of course, don't forget all the commercial software vendors who were previously selling MacOS applications, now those folks are porting or have ported their stuff to MacOS X. It's a lot easier to go from MacOX X to UNIX, then from MacOS Classic to UNIX. So, don't knock this kind of thing when you see it happen, just keep in mind that there are always going to be some benefits, perhaps not just that visible. Ted
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