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Date:      Tue, 12 Jun 2001 19:30:22 +0200
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
To:        Rich Wilson <wk633@yahoo.com>
Cc:        advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Mundie, Perens, GPL, BSD etc again
Message-ID:  <20010612193022.K7519@lpt.ens.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20010612164749.38598.qmail@web12308.mail.yahoo.com>; from wk633@yahoo.com on Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 09:47:49AM -0700
References:  <20010612164749.38598.qmail@web12308.mail.yahoo.com>

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Rich Wilson said on Jun 12, 2001 at 09:47:49:
> Aritlce on ZDNet: Is BSD getting lost amid the open source salvos?
> 
> Evan Leibovitch has some ideas as to why BSD is so quiet durring all of this.
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2772296,00.html

Looks like he's been reading the FreeBSD mailing list archives (he
links to a mail to this list by Ted Mittelstaedt...)  and possibly
sites like daily.daemonnews (where the original poster called the
signatories of the Perens letter a "cadre of elitists" and a "clique
of millionaires" [1], has the impression that the BSD people don't
like the Linux people.  

Which is, obviously, not an unjustified impression.  Though I have
never understood this attitude.  What's the point of fighting linux?
It's not the real enemy (or any kind of enemy). 

Leibovitch asks why BSD people aren't speaking out.  But as I
mentioned in an earlier mail [2], BSD people hardly ever speak out about
broad issues of "free software".  It's left to people like Eric
Raymond to talk about BSD while rebutting Mundie [3].

On the other hand, people routinely complain when BSD people aren't
asked to co-sign such letters.  I find it not at all surprising that
the "free software community" doesn't have BSD uppermost in mind,
since the BSD community itself likes to stay so aloof from the rest of
the free software world.

Also, I don't think BSD is immune from damage merely because Microsoft
was training its guns on the GPL.  If Microsoft does succeed in
out-fudding Linux, and if the popularity of the BSDs continues to
increase, the BSD systems will be the next target of the FUD machine,
business-friendly license or not.  ("First they came for the Jews...")

- Rahul

[1] http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=1918

[2] http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=80178+0+archive/2001/freebsd-advocacy/20010527.freebsd-advocacy

[3] http://lwn.net/2001/0607/a/esr-big-lie.php3

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