Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2003 12:26:48 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com>, Mike Jeays <mj001@rogers.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bystander shot by a spam filter. Message-ID: <3E189508.E01ACD21@mindspring.com> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20030104193110.0285a570@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104145840.02925620@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104131212.03837e10@localhost> <3E120659.3D60EB30@mindspring.com> <200212312041.gBVKfr183480@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org> <3E120659.3D60EB30@mindspring.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104112015.026a5530@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104131212.03837e10@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104145840.02925620@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030104193110.0285a570@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030105121306.02936b00@localhost> <4.3.2.7.2.20030105130229.029271d0@localhost>
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Brett Glass wrote: > At 12:59 PM 1/5/2003, Terry Lambert wrote: > >My personal take is that license matters for strategic code, but > >does not matter at all for tactical code. > > It matters in both cases. If "tactical" code is GPLed, you can't > look at it or fix it, and the GPL will extinguish alternatives. Sure you can: it's just that the result remains GPL. Personally, I don't have a problem with this for tactical code, since tactical code, by definition, has no real commercial value. One common mistake that companies make is an inability to discern the difference between "tactical" and "strategic", and then they go and expend some huge amount of effort defending something of a tactical nature, as if it were strategic. Literally billions of VC dollars have been burned by companies on what were essentially tactical issues, with the company doing the burning eventually failing and going under, as a result. SAMBA is a particularly good example, because SAMBA's whole being, their raison d'ettre, is "to keep up with changes Microsoft makes to their CIFS implementation". SAMBA's job is to fight a holding action in defense of a tactical objective. And by doing that, they prevent the objective from becoming strategic for Microsoft, again. Meanwhile, Microsoft burns tons of money trying to convert the disputed ground into a strategic advantage. Right now, they are arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a 32 bit Active Directory record ID jammed into an expansion field in the Kerberos standard, which was never intended to contain a reference to an external implementation. The smart thing for Microsoft to do would be to give away their CIFS code under a license that was not the GPL, but which permitted modification and use by third parties... which would immediately fragment the hell out of the commercial SAMBA support, and, likely, regain Microsoft strategic control over the direction of the standard, when all they have right now is tactical control, because the SAMBA people follow them faster than they can change direction. > >SAMBA is an example of tactical code; if you are building a small > >office server, and need to offer CIFS access to it to be competitive, > >you might as well use SAMBA to do it: the code itself is relatively > >independent of all other code, and you aren't going to gain any > >competitive advantage out of using it. So it might as well be GPL'ed. > > I strongly disagree. The fact that SAMBA is GPLed prevents its use > to develop competitive operating systems that interact well with > Microsoft clients. Thus, SAMBA (perversely) preserves Microsoft's > monopoly on commercial operating systems. No, really, it doesn't. Hosted services are not a function of the OS, and even Microsoft is learning this lesson, and moving such things into the applications layer, where an error or an exploit based on them, doesn't result in the entire system destabilizing. SAMBA can run on any competitive OS you want to name, without the license interacting with the OS license whatsoever. > We recently needed to set up a file repository for a business, and > because SAMBA is GPLed, we used WebDAV. We're very happy with that > solution. And we can look at the code of mod_dav, because it's under > a truly free license. That's a religious argument. I'd like to see the business case for this decision (e.g. something like a 5 year profit/loss estimate difference in the projections based on one choice vs. another). I rather expect that, while the benefit to the business of having something to fill that ecological niche is, for them, strategic, the choice on what actually filled it for them was purely tactical, and had no real strategic motivation past "we need a file repository". -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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