Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 21:56:29 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Greg Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>, "Don Wilde" <Don@Silver-Lynx.com> Cc: "Anders Nordby" <anders@fix.no>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG>, <core@daemonnews.org> Subject: RE: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand Together" Message-ID: <002101c0df56$e6c62260$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010518112834.I55915@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Greg Lehey >Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 6:59 PM >To: Don Wilde >Cc: Anders Nordby; freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG; core@daemonnews.org >Subject: Re: [dn-core] Re: Perens' "Free Software Leaders Stand >Together" > > >On Thursday, 17 May 2001 at 8:29:51 -0600, Don Wilde wrote: >> >> >> Anders Nordby wrote: >>> >>> Hi, >>> >>> I'm a little dissatisfied with the fact that it seems Bruce Perens >>> doesn't seem to want to include any BSD persons on a list of "free >>> software leaders". Is he really that much of a zealot, and does he lack >>> history knowledge? Or is it just me that got this all wrong? Did he >>> actually ask any BSD persons? >>> >> He says quite clearly that he is focusing on GPL. That's his right. >> There's nothing stopping us from doing likewise. He obviously believes >> the GPL is a "better" license. Perhaps we can ask Chris Coleman to add a >> page to DaemonNews.org with a simple PHP/MySQL sign-up so that we can >> _all_ add our signatures and e-mails to such a letter. Come to think of >> it, this would probably be a great way to tell how many users *BSD >> actually has... > >*sigh* Bruce seems to be apprehensive about our reaction. In his >words, we should "stand together", not set up our own reaction. I've >replied to the thread in this vein. > As well he should be. Remember, Bruce is the person who explicitly recommended _against_ developers using the BSD license, when he originally copyrighted the term "Open Source". It wasn't until the Regents of the University of California explictly stated that the UCB copyright didn't need to be displayed that Bruce couldn't find any more excuses to recommend against the BSD license, and changed the recommendations to be more neutral. The real issues go a lot deeper and if you go back several years in history you can see what is going on. Simply put, the so-called "leaders of the GPL" movement are engaged in a war of words and in media manipulation in an attempt to equate "Free Software" and "Open Source" directly with the GPL. They do NOT like the BSD license, and particularly don't like FreeBSD, (both because FreeBSD is the flagship of the BSD license, and because FreeBSD uses the term "Free" in it's name thus causing problems for their little doublespeak game of attempting to equate GPL and Open Source) Basically, what has happened is that Bruce and his friends (the signatories on the list of that article are a who's who of them) have literally made millions of dollars out of in effect convincing a bunch of developers to GPL their code, then those Open Source people have set themselves up in the only point in the GPL code distributon scheme (the nexus points) where it's possible to make a lot of money. VA Linux, Red Hat, and all of those distributors, all of their business models are the same - at one end they suck in GPL code and at the other end spit out finished UNIX-like distributions, and make money doing it. Notice that I said they suck in GPL code - they don't really have interest in pointing their suckers at BSD code. For their business models to continue to work, they must continue to convince an ever-larger number of Open Source developers to write GPL code. In the BSD arena, the money-making is a lot different. The people in BSD making millions are doing it by including BSD code in finished products. In our world, the things that matter are finished products like Whistler Interjet, and the embedded stuff that Wind River is doing, because those projects untimately spew code back into the BSD distribution. In BSD-land, you don't have people making millions of dollars primariarly off of repackaging the BSD distribution. The GPL people see folks like Microsoft rightly as their antithesis - but the fact that Microsoft themselves uses a fair bit of BSD code _themselves_ in their own products isn't lost on the Linux people. Now, the GPL camp sees Apple using BSD code as a base, and they have forseen the future and are scared of what is coming. What _is_ coming is eventually things will reach a head where most of the commercial software developers will realize that to continue to be successful, that they MUST make allowance for Open Source. Either by interfacing with it, or using parts of it, or producing modules that enhance it. Simply put the body of good Open Source is getting so large and representing such a major human knowledge database in software, that if you as a commercial software developer set yourself out to compete directly with Open Source, your competition will be so far ahead that you will never catch up. So, if your a commercial software house in this situation, you end up with a choice: either you can choose to go the GPL route, or you can choose to go the BSD route. If you go the BSD route then your on your own. The great thing about this is that nobody will tell you what to do, so you really do have complete freedom to do what you want. Of course the downside is that the BSD community isn't going to patiently hold your hand while you negotiate the rocks in the stream. If, however, you go the GPL route, then there will be a crew of people, like Bruce, Raymond, and Tim O'Reilly and Linus and all the rest of them that are going to be guiding you down the path that they want you to go, and of course making money off of doing this. The "great" thing about this, I suppose, is that they will always be there to hold you hand while you negotiate the rocks in the stream. Of course the downside is that you really have no control once you start mixing GPL into your stuff, then the GPL community ends up dictating to you what your going to be doing. But, the GPL people all figure that commercial software houses that go the Microsoft route give up the same control and don't seem to have a problem doing it, so why shouldn't they give up the same control to GPL that they are giving up to Microsoft? So, you can see why GPL is very uneasy with BSD. They see the GPL as in direct opposition to commercial software license. They see the BSD license as not being in direct opposition to commercial software, and in fact they see that there is a symbiosis between BSD and commercial software, even between BSD and Microsoft, if you can believe it. Take the Hotmail situation for example - where do you think that Microsoft got all THE IDEAS to stuff into Windows 2K to enable it to REPLACE FreeBSD? Certainly NOT by studying Linux, I can tell you that. Instead, Microsoft spent years studying the BSD way of doing things, looked at the new web technologies like PHP and so on that were coming down the pike, and emulated those in Win2K. So, it's kind of a "friend of my enemy is my enemy" What I see in the future, is I see Microsoft porting MS Office to MacOS X - which is a hell of a lot closer to BSD then it is to Linux. I also see that as Microsoft continues to build the case against GPL and propgandize against it, that they are increasingly going to be holding up BSD as the "right" way to do Open Source. No wonder that the Linux GPL people are drawing the line in the sand now between BSD and GPL. They see the future and they know that ultimately, the GPL is just as "un-free" as a closed source license like Microsoft's. Increasingly, their aims and goals are going to be different than ours. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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