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he and Allen wrote BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 by scratch

More like cloned a version of DECUS BASIC Gates obtained from a DEC users group. They wrote it on DEC PDP-8/L at the Lakeside school.

Sure, you can get Fedora for free, but it's not the same product. If you want RHEL, you pay for it, one copy one "support contract"... plain and simple.

I suspect they'd also be playing rather fast and loose with the GPL, as well.

This is the entire reason why I've always believed more in the BSD license for business. The GPL was specifically designed to disallow monopoly. Of course, the usual Communists in the audience will immediately scream that that is as it should be. What they are as usual forgetting, however, is that they cannot ultimately use the law to force others to subscribe to their worldview. If the GPL makes establishment of monopoly illegal, business will break the law. It's that simple. All the GPL really means is that piracy shifts from the end-user to the vendor. The law is still broken; merely in a different place.

Businesses being able to use code under the BSD license means they don't need to break the law in order to adhere to capitalist methodology. The consortium model which this document advocates could have worked, and still could.

The above linked document also talks incidentally about the GPL making companies vulnerable to hostile takeover. Red Hat has zero tangible assets, at least where IP is concerned. They might have their artwork, but that is it. Hence, they're completely expendable.

Mark me on this; if Oracle swallows Red Hat, it will set precedent. Other people in the business world will notice what can happen to a FOSS company that has zero or negligible unique IP of their own, and said noticing has the potential to massively harm Linux's continued corporate adoption. Then again, perhaps that would be a good thing...if the corporate world's love affair with Linux were to end, it might turn them towards the BSDs, and to creating a scenario where people can begin to more genuinely economically benefit themselves and each other, rather than the current scenario of everyone involved with Linux being forced footsoldiers in the cause of Stallman's radicalism.

Linus Torvalds might have believed initially, and might still believe now, that adopting the GPL as Linux's license made good sense...but it has been a mistake, and I suspect that even if he himself does not, many other people will live to regret it.

>Your problem is that you pit FOSS licences and
>their supporters against each other for no good
>reason.

Er...I think that fight's already been started...and not by me. Stallman thinks everyone is entitled to his opinion, and his opinion only. That to me, by definition, is not freedom.

This might interest you as well...it talks about some of the other, more practical problems associated with the GPL...Stallman's megalomaniacal egotism notwithstanding.

Before you also accuse me of doing exactly the same thing he does here, realise that my interest would not be in seeing the GPL erradicated completely, at all...Rather what I want is for Stallman to stop telling people that the GPL is the *only* valid OSS license in existence, and that the others should not exist. They should be able to just as much as the GPL itself does, IMHO.

One view from Why Researchers Should use a BSD-style License Instead of the GPL :

Linux is most attractive commercially to (1) small companies selling CDs primarily to end-users, not developers, in an environment where ``buy-low, sell-high'' may still give the end-user a very cheap product (this does not mean that Linux is not attractive to programmers); (2) hardware companies that intend to undermine software companies in the OS business; and (3) companies that expect to survive by providing various forms of technical support (including documentation) for the GPLed intellectual property world.

Why Researchers Should use a BSD-style License Instead of the GPL

"If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux?"

That's pretty obvious: because the GPL is very favourable to large companies specialized in hardware/assistance (IBM, HP, etc), since it gives them the chance to compete on what they do best and undercut software companies.
( An interesting link )

"BSD fans tell you all the time that BSD license is better for getting businesses and large corporations behind the product."

I really don't think "BSD fans" tell it "all the time", because it would be wrong (unless you restrict that to *software* companies).

What BSD advocates might be telling "all the time" is that the BSD license is more free than the GPL, since it comes with fewer restrictions; that it's much shorter and it avoids legalese, in order to keep lawyers & law issues out of your way; and most of all, that the BSD license reflects an actual academic spirit, unencumbered by any political junk that has hardly anything to do with computer science.

The only point in favor of the GPL is that it's contributing to make the Microsoft monopoly end sooner - and that's actually good.
For the rest, the GPL is just a political manifesto - a *communist* manifesto, to be precise, since its declared purpose is to put an end to private property as far as software is concerned.

"BSD license may be good for business, but it isn't as good for the community, and the users."

Of course it depends on what users you're talking about. For those users who are also professional programmers, the BSD license is obviously better, since it doesn't force you to disclose *your own* code whether you want it or not, like the GPL does.

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Requiem for the FUD