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Caldera Mulling Alternate Licenses
edoug writes: "Ransom Love (CEO of Caldera) said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense. And so, Caldera is mulling a non-GPL licensing mechanism -- most likely one based on the BSD license. Love said: "Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL." Check out the article here ." Update: 05/10 7:30 AM by michael : Newsforge has an interview with Love.
By creating a non-GPL UNIX-compatible operating system running on Intel hardware, they could have a product as useful, exciting, nay revolutionary, as SCO UNIX!
Customers will abandon Solaris, Windows, and Linux in droves!
"As with so many other activists, you (and the Open Source/Free Software community at large) have failed to see that commerce is a necessity in the society we have built, and that it must be catered to until we either alter that societal structure, or replace it."
I love stereotypes. No thinking required.
I suppose that "./"'s have never heard of social balance.
I think business is plenty catered to. DMCA,EULA's,etc,etc. Any more catering and our new motto will be. A nation by the corporation, for the corporation.
And yet it took Linux, under the GPL, to unify and bring Unix and Unix-like systems back from the dead. I think Caldera is doing a MASSIVE disservice to the community by backing Microsoft's anti-competition vendetta against the GPL. I wonder if they are in talks for a possible take over?
Apache is under the apache licence. NOT THE BSD LICENCE.
What is a business?
An entity whose sole purpose is to extract every
possible resource for as little as possible then
sell that resource for as much as possible.
The GPL requires a business to give back, freely,
some resources.
The BSD allows then to extract every drop of blood
from hard-working people and resell it for max profit.
Hmm.. I wonder why MS is trying to convince everyone to use the BSD license...
Similary, for a lettuce delivery business, using GPL'd code to build scheduling software that'll only ever run on internal servers does NOT mean that the modified code has to be released to competitors.
In other words, if I change my local version of bash to print my prompt in a random color, then I am under NO OBLIGATION to distribute my changes unless I choose to distribute the binary. So long as that stays on my machine, the source is mine.
How long before Webster includes words such as fudding and slashdotted into their dictionary? These are awesome geek creations.
In a previous discussion about a week ago, one guy quoted a Microsoft employee. He said that the BSD stack was to hard to port over cleanly, and thus they created their own. They obviously looked at the BSD stack as a reference, but wanted to make a nicer implementation for their OS.
The ftp example is nonsense, since its basically standard code and almost a pure compile on any other system would make it work. Microsoft has no reason to dislike BSD and similar licenses because at the very least they are given hints and references to how to implement something.. but with the GPL-like licenses, many companies strictly forbid their employees to read over the code. The fear is that they will mistakenly (or lazily) take it, and the company will be in big trouble. I believe Microsoft had this policy for Mozilla.
GNU/LINUX and MS are very similar, as both look at BSD-like code for references and both have reasons of intelectual property, etc. for recreating it or embracing its code silently. Microsoft with the tcp/ip stack reference, GNU with utility reference (vim). The difference in these two is MS did it out of programming methodology, while GNU did it out of license frenzy.
Nothing new comes out of MS
1) Office is and will continue to be the office suite standard. Believe it or not, people (lots of people) love Office, with good reason. (StarOffice: I might be able to judge it, come back to me next week when it has loaded up. KOffice: not enough developers to make it as mature and complete as Office. Anything else?)
2) As much as I hate to admit it, you must concur that the optimal web-browsing experience to be had today is on IE. More plugins, more sites that are designed for it, more useable. Parly due to their shady bundling, but alsy partly due to the fact that IE actually does a good job of web browsing. (You won't catch me dead using it though)
Open Source development could easily be their R&D department.
Other than the TCP/IP stack that everyone loves to jump up and down about, can you name another thing they've taken from the open-source community? (The Mac GUI? Since when was that open-source? You can't stop them from taking ideas. And Apple knew this when they stole (stold?) the GUI from Xerox. And the big two desktop environments for *nix knew it too, when they duped it from their predecessors.)
The fact is that multi-billion dollar companies don't really need to copy code . Apache was (and is) the server of choice when IIS was in development. They didn't copy that too, did they? Why? Because they have tons of smart people on the payroll thinking up their own ideas/implementations (e.g. http://research.microsoft.com).
My last point is about the GPL. Do you really think that if Microsoft put GPL code in their closed stuff, they couldn't get away with it? They're high-priced lawyers would eat the GPL for breakfast. (Not to mention the fact that I've spoken with more than one lawyer who thinks the GPL will not stand up in court.)
(Moderators: this post is pro-Microsoft. You have no choice but to mod down.)
Mr. Love has been espousing these beliefs for YEARS!
This thesis.
This keynote at Summer Comdex '99
This 'Presidents letter' at Caldera...
Let's not just say 'heresy'...let's THINK for once!
They have done some work on the kernel and hardware drivers and that sort of thing. Of course, that stuff's gonna stay under the GPL so there's nothing to worry about.
[root@eclipse linux-2.4.2]# grep -ri caldera *
gives plenty of examples. 27 lines in the source contain Caldera, mostly giving credit and e-mail addresses in such things as IPX drivers, SCSI, and sound.
Samba was not a copy of a concept. Unix already had that concept before Windows even knew what networking was. It was called NFS. Samba is just a way to work with Windows clients that refuse to play well with others and insist on only speaking Windows' drive sharing protocol (SMB).
Outlook is merely a copy of tools available on Unix beforehand.
Sure, a lot of KDE and Gnome are copying Windows apps, but the Windows apps they are copying were themselves copies of existing things in older Unixen. KDE and Gnome are merely making tools for people who are used to Windows because Windows is popular, NOT because these tools are anything new.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Basically he's saying that the GPL might not make sense for certain commercially available products. Honestly this isn't much news... It's just more repercussions from the Mundie talk. Love is just restating the obvious that businesses like to keep their modifications to code that they distribute a secret. Big deal. There's no story here, folks... move along.
People always ask me why I write open source. They want to know why I will give my source code away for free when others can just steal my hard work and claim it as their own. These people, and apparently Mr. Love, are not familiar with the terms of the GPL.
Because of the GPL my open source code is protected. I can give, sell, or rent my code out to someone, but if they change the code and want to distribute it, they have to play by the exact same rules. They can give, sell or rent their changed code, but they have to provide the source and the same licensing mechanism along with it.
IMHO, the GPL is Open Source's STRONGEST point. It ensures that open source programmers won't be taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies who would simply steal their hard work and claim it as their own (which they could under the BSD license). Remember the Halloween Documents? The ones where Microsoft claimed that the biggest threat they faced from Linux (and by logical extension Open Source) was that by sharing the code, open source could harness the peer review and programming power of millions of programmers all over the world. Wouldn't it just play into Microsoft's hand perfectly if they could absorb all this open source power without having to respect the freedom guaranteed by the GPL?
I don't know what Mr. Love's angle is, but I do know that he is gravely mistaken about what the GPL is and what it represents to the Open Source community. It is one of our cornerstones, it is our Bill of Rights, it guarantees software's freedom and provides a safe environment for intellectual exchange, peer review and software maturation.
For a company? I mean, if BSD makes sense for a commercial entity, why don't companies release their "core" IP under the BSD license (with some exceptions, like some companies release reference/standard implementations where the software was not meant as a money making mechanism)? I don't think anyone will complain, maybe except the company shareholders.
Come on, Caldera! You are an OS company and a Linux vendor. Your main business is software. You are the proud owner of CP/M, DR DOS, GEM, and the true (AT&T's) UNIX source code (today known as SCO Unix). Release them under the BSD license! (GEM is already released under GPL, but the other three are not released as open source yet)
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Right now OS X has approximately zero users. You might think that it is cool, and you might even be willing to pay a premium for Mac OS X hardware (and software), but not very many other people are so inclined. Heck, there are probably more Linux installs on former Mac hardware than there are OS X installs. Perhaps in the future this won't be the case, but to say that Mac OS X is top dog in the Free *nix world (especially considering that it isn't a Free *nix but is only based on one) is premature.
Cygnus made money at Free Software for years (as has the FSF, but they made so little money that it hardly counts). RedHat recently broke even, while growing their business at an astounding rate. Considering that 90% of all new businesses fail, Free Software companies aren't doing so bad, and it is not as if they are failing to gain customers. They simply made the same mistake that the rest of the market made and spent too much in pursuit of marketshare. When the stock market was going crazy this sort of made sense because capital was so easy to acquire.
Just remember, more closed source companies have gone spectacularly bankrupt than there will ever be Free Software companies. And Free Software was doing just fine long before there were any corporations involved. Mac OS X is a fine example of this. They have been promising a new OS for years, and it wasn't until Apple "borrowed" the work of Open Source volunteers that they were actually able to produce one. While Apple was busy sprinting from one spectacular failure to the next, the folks creating BSD were cranking out an OS that worked spectacularly, and they were doing it largely in their spare time.
Caldera has always felt that the only way to make money with Linux was to bundle it with proprietary software. In fact, that's probably the reason that they aren't in RedHat's position right now. They have always had a solid, easy to use distribution, but it has also always been more expensive than everyone else's distribution, and it has generally always included proprietary bits that made it illegal to simply burn copies.
Now Caldera is looking to extend Linux in proprietary ways (Volution) and they are finding all of this GPLed software bothersome. The fact of the matter is that the GPL has almost certainly been an asset to Linux. If this weren't the case then one of the BSDs would be top dog in the Free *nix world. The fact of the matter is that software consumers love the GPL. It gives them an unprecedented amount of leverage. And in software, like in all business, the customer is always right.
BSD arguably did have a similar effect if you consider the bigger picture of UNIX and TCP/IP. Not to mention the fact that two of the largest Free Software projects use a copyright agreement similar to BSD: Apache and X.
--
If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.
Couldn't anyone rewrite the code and slap new copyright on it? After all when IBM GPLs a piece of code it's our code.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
I think you miss the point.
Let's say IBM does develop a really really cool application for Linux. I don't know what that is, but just call it foo.
They release it under the GPL. That means that now you as the consumer are granted the specific rights to obtain the source code. But even more importantly you have the rights to modify, copy, distribute without restriction.
So you just take foo and throw it up on your own webpage for free download.
Redhat comes along, takes the free download and incorporates it into their product. So does SuSe, Caldera, Slackware and Corel.
Great for the community.
Not so great for IBM who is out a billion research bucks with a $0 ROI.
Honestly, I can't help but wonder why you aren't petitioning the Pope to convince him to start up a software development house at the Vatican.
Then when the starving children in Africa come looking for help, you can explain how much better Linux is and why they should support the GPL.
"There's nothing preventing you from charging a million dollars for that binary."
Well that's technically true.
You can charge $1 million to the first sucker who comes along and is willing to pay it.
Then they distribute it for free.
But chances are you'll never find a sucker who is willing to pay you $1 million.
As far as the Apache example. I think you need a little more imagination.
Ok, let me get this straight.
Exactly how is Apple taking anything from the community by utilizing BSD code?
That uses the explicit assumption that software is a scarce item and that by using BSD code, Apple is taking away from others being able to use BSD code.
That is simply not the case.
The code still exists, the source still exists, you and everybody else is still completely free to use it. It never goes away because it's been released for free under a BSD license.
Does it protect the authors? Absolutely. In the same exact way as Public Domain and the GPL. Obviously they have chosen to give their code away for free, so so be it. What more protection do they need? Freedom from being sued? Ok, put a warranty disclaimer on it like the GPL has, big deal.
More importantly the BSD license protects subsequent authors who add value. It gives these authors the freedom and liberty to do with their own modifications what they want. They can in turn release their modifications under the BSD license, or they can keep them closed, whatever.
Does it protect consumers? Again, absolutely. Consumers still have a choice, they can use the original code for free, or they can use the value-add code for a small fee. It all depends on whether that value-add is worth something to the consumer.
There are a lot of products distributed in this fashion. A free version, and a value-add version. I don't see consumers complaining. Isn't this what has made X-11, sendmail, Apache, etc. so successful?
The GPL doesn't protect consumers at all. It insures they have the source code, but it also disclaims all warranties on the condition of that source. It may or may not work, we don't care, don't bug us we'll call you if we care, but don't sit by the phone.
It's amazing how incredibly selfish GPL proponents are. It seems so against the whole nature of this Open Source thing and giving to the community.
But Apple never took anything which wasn't offered freely.
And the obvious intent of offering the software for free under the BSD license was to invoke the spirit of Open Source. Share it with others so many can benefit.
In this case, millions of Apple users will benefit.
These same apple users could also run NetBSD or something similar if they wanted. But Apple has extended the Unix environment with a unique new user interface which is very desirable and helpful to consumers.
As far as your last snide remark. I didn't say sharing is selfish, I said 'sharing with strings attached' is selfish.
I also do not own an Apple, do not own Apple hardware, do not really care for Steve Jobs. But I at least understand and appreciate what they are trying to do.
Exactly how has it not worked out for those in Africa dying of AIDS?
The drug companies have certainly been willing to accomodate the needs of those governments by providing low cost drugs.
Without the IP laws those drugs would not even exist to begin with. No company can afford to provide billions in research for free.
You seem to be of the notion that the world owes you a favor, and should be forced to donate their money to your cause, either through tax dollars or tithes.
So I suggest you look towards the Catholic Church for help in this endeavor.
"If IBM releases something under the GPL they've prevented anyone from filing off the name and rereleasing it as a proprietary project. "
The same is true of the BSD license.
As far as your other comments... it must not be the bad crack you've been smoking.
Umm... How can you disagree with me and agree at the same time?
Whether or not IBM is releasing a version of Linux is irrelevant.
What is relevant is whether IBM releases DB/2 source under a GPL license.
By tying all research/development costs of software into the cost of the hardware, IBM places themselves in an interesting situation of not being price competitive on the hardware side.
Why should I buy IBM hardware which costs $X + $Y(for the cost of software) when I can go to HP and buy equivalent hardware for $X and download the software off IBM's website for free?
Anyway, I think it's obvious that you completely agree with me, you just can't see that now.
So who cares?
They are not taking away anything from anyone. They only thing they are close sourcing is their modifications to the project.
If these modifications are of value, then pay for them.
If these modifications are not of value, then don't... continue to use the free version.
If they are very simple modifications, than go to your own effort to add them into the free version.
At no time can anybody take the freely released BSD version and hide it from you. Never. It's just not possible. Once released it's out in the world to stay.
I thought the point of doing Free Software was to give it away for free so that all others could benefit?
Now your saying that, no, in fact you are a greedy selfish bastard who wants to tie strings to your gift.
Besides can't you just do a BSD license and add a 'But if you use this for a commercial purpose get my permission first?'
When I was a young twerp in college I had an attitude such as yours, but I've long come to realize that isn't why I was giving my software away. Nearly everything I've written has been under a BSD license, even stuff I patch.
Oh give me a break, the GPL is the very embodiment of Software Communism. It has nothing to do with brainwashing, it's a simple question of critical thinking.
But you know what? I really don't care. If you want to use the GPL, then do so.
But don't expect the rest of the world to conform!
That's actually what makes the GPL so alike to the Soviet Union. Can't convince people to freely be part of the Community, so the only other option is to force them to be. Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whatever. I don't want any of it.
Umm, I recently had the misfortune of having to find and fix a problem on an SCO Unix system. Believe me, sometimes, it's best not to share.
I hope they didn't pay too much for it (read, more than the cost of duplication)...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
If you release under the BSD license, other people can use you code in their proprietary products without paying you anything. But if you release under the GPL or something more restrictive, they can't unless they (a) make it non-proprietary (in which case you can incorporate any features they add back into your code) or (b) they buy a new license from you that allows them to do things that the GPL doesn't. If they're in the business of producing proprietary software, obviously (b) is their only choice.
This is exactly how Qt works these days. You can use it under the GPL and abide by its terms, or you can buy a commercial license for it if you need it for a closed-source project.
The Trolls aren't idiots. GPL is a much more business friendly license than BSD. I'm sure Ransom Love isn't considering a straight-BSD license either. He's probably looking for something even more restrictive than the GPL, ala Apple/Netscape/Sun/etc...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
None of this is true about the GPL if the authors choose to play ball. If a developer is willing to work with businesses, and get compensated for his or her work, he or she can release under GPL all day, and when businesses come begging to use his or her code, negotiate a commercial license and make a tidy profit.
The GPL can be used as a tool by anti-business developers to stop businesses from benefiting from their work. But it can also be used as a tool by business friendly developers to make money from their work.
The GPL is, after all, just a tool. In the hands of an anti-business zealot like RMS, it is an effective anti-business weapon. In the hands of a pro-business company like Qt, it's an effective way to ensure they get paid for their work. The GPL is, in and of itself, neither pro nor anti-business, and is not responsible for how people use or abuse it. Stop trying to anthropomorphize it and start trying to understand it. You may get somewhere...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
They don't "dictate the importance of a licence". Where did you get that idea? They inform you whether a license is GPL compatible or not. It's up to you to decide whether and how important that is.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
> ive been saying this for months...
.com . They've been around for a while. Also, their business is certainly not "based solely" on their Linux distro.
I'm glad you have this insight, but it's nothing new. It was all layed out in the GNU Manifesto in the 80's. Stallman plainly understood the effect GPL'ed software would have on the business environment. He says straight out that the way to make money with free software is to sell support, or do contract programming.
And Caldera is hardly a
That said, I wouldn't really mind seeing Caldera shrivel up and die. They sure aren't doing the open source world any favors.
--Lenny
Moreover, to be quite honest, I'd say that Caldera has focussed on packaging Linux with proprietary value-added software almost from the beginning (e.g., NDS, NCP, Wabi, Wordperfect 7, Netscape Fasttrack Server, others). Now they've bought SCO and the Unix trademark. Blaming the GPL licensing of _other_ software distributed with Linux, or, (are they insane?) Linux itself for the failure of Caldera to aggregate a sustainable Linux service business seems misguided and maybe dishonest.
Just as it's self-evident that lots of software infrastructure is not going to be free any time soon, it should be equally clear that _which_ packages "should" or "can't" be developed under a particular license just isn't obvious.
Sorry Caldera (and Brett Glass, and Microsoft), but you're just going to have to live with that. Whining isn't going to make your free competitors go away.
Matt
Uhm, no. BSD would still be there, without the GPL. Mach would still be there, without the GPL. X Windows would still be there, without the GPL. Apache would still be there, without the GPL, Tcl/Tk would still be there, without the GPL. This list goes on and on, but what is really telling is that the most important, BSD, Mach, and the X Windows System all predate GNU :)
One more time: you do not have to accept the GPL to use GPLed software. Only when you choose to redistribute that code or modifactions / derivatives of it, you have to face the GPL.
You can write proprietary applications that interact with GPLed software. You can even look at the source to study the API at no cost and without any obligation.
It even makes sense to write GPLed software in case you want to take advantage of the open source development model. In this case, the BSD license is more trouble for companies because in that case they lose total control, with the GPL they will at least have enforced that any modifications or derivatives can be merged back if desired. But perhaps a NPL/MPL style license makes more sense as business model when writing software.
It does make business sense if you do not use GPLed libraries. The FSF deliberately promotes the use of GPLed libraries so that the community can have an advantage over proprietary developers.
So thanks for noticing that the GPL can be used against businesses, but this was intentional in this case. So let's not get mad at Mundie or Caldera, some of us did this on purpose. We just need to make clear that when it comes to libraries, there is the LGPL: it makes perfect business sense to use LGPLed libraries.
Preventing Apple from being able to choose how they license the code they produce doesn't protect the community at all. It just places a roadblock in front of community code that prevents large segments of the community from being able to use it.
I as a developer choose to give my code away under an open source license such as the BSD license. I love having the freedom to do so. When I give my code away, I hope that as many people as possible will be able to benefit from it. It's my gift to the community.
This is quite unlike developers who give their code away under the GPL license, which is in effect saying that they only wish to share with and provide value to other developers who agree with them philosophically. Code shared under the GPL is only accessable to other developers who are using the GPL. From a code re-use perspective, this is a less desireable situation than a less restrictive license.
GPL'd code benefits the GPL community. BSD licensed'd code benefits the entire software development community. Two very different goals and effects.
As a contributor to FreeBSD, I have no objection at all with Apple's use of FreeBSD code to build MacOs X. Apple users will gain the benefit of a very mature and well-tested userland. Had there not been an open source alternative, or had there only been a GPL'd codebase then I'm sure Apple would have been forced to re-invent the wheel that the FreeBSD developers have already built. The end result for Apple users would have been a longer development cycle for OSX, less tested and possibly less robust code.
Apple has put a great deal of time, money, and effort into OSX and I don't feel that I have any right to force them to choose how they can license that code, which is theirs, just by virtue of my having shared my code. I'm just as glad that the BSD licensed FreeBSD code has been useful to Apple as I am that it has been useful to people who have incorporated it into GPL'd codebases. (I'd also note that if someone takes FreeBSD code and GPL'd it, it's just as inaccessable to me as a commercial developer as it would be had they used it in a closed-source license)
It's not sharing if you place signifigant restrictions on the code's use, as the GPL does. The GPL is just another license in this respect.
Wouldn't releasing that intellectual property under a *more* liberal license (BSD-ish) make them even greater fools?
;-)
At least with the GPL, the intellectual property remains within the sphere of competitors that also release their source. A more liberal license would expand that sphere to include proprietary competitors, which isn't exactly useful in the "prevent going broke" thing
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
Mo dt hi sup !2 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc
--
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Believe it or not, professionals like myself are DYING to get away from Windows to ESCAPE Microsoft Office, because it has become so screwed up that it is unusable for professional work. I've had to start going over my hardcopy printouts in Word on a page by page basis to make sure cross-references and numbered lists haven't become spontaneously corrupted. These are features that used to work dependably. I have little faith that they will ever be fixed properly, since there are still significant and well-known bugs from Word 2.0 left in the code (ex: the section break bug).
If Office were being introduced as a new set of apps, I'd have to say "nice features, but it's just not dependable enough to use."
As for IE5, it crashes just as much as Netscape, and I prefer the way new Netscape windows inherit the maximization of the parent window.
Every piece of software from Microsft seems to turn into "feature landfill."
Moreover, and getting back to the point you were trying to rebut, Office and IE were nothing new. Office was copying WordPerfect and Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics, and IE was BOUGHT from another company! Office's major innovation was its interoperability among apps, and the fact that it was sold at a discount as a suite, and I'm not sure those were really innovations.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
It's a LICENCE, for crying out loud! It RUNS ON the concept of intellectual property! You cannot licence what you do not own!
What it IS "anti" is the concept of closed source licensing that locks its users out of the code so that they can't fix it and work with it. But that isn't being against the concept of intellectual property, it's against an abuse of that concept, in much the same way that anti-monopoly law is not anti-free-market.
The GPL was intended to correct a problem with the way software was being licenced, all while staying within the legal framework of software licencing.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Your example only works if Red Hat wanted to be in the business of installing applications for users. I doubt that they do: you don't get enough money for the small stuff, and maintaining a support staff for drudgework only leads to high turnover in that department.
Red Hat probably wants to be IBM when they grow up, only they won't even have to do the hardware. They want to sell their expertise to big companies with big expense accounts.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
According to the License List at gnu.org, the modified BSD license is "a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license with no particular problem. It is compatible with the GNU GPL." The original BSD license is listed as "a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software non-free. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL."
They certainly must honor the GPL for their software that is already under it, but I don't think they have an obligation to release every little thing they make under the GPL. It's not right to consider them leeches if they have some proprietary things. If it was wrong to do this, then don't you think the GPL would have addressed it? If there's some kind of unwritten code at work here, then we've either got to codify it in the license, or we've got to simply drop the issue. How can we expect companies not to offend us unless we specifically outline exactly what we find acceptable as a community?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The GPL is what makes Linux a threat. They can't embrace and extend it, it embraces and extends THEM. And that scares the heck otu of them, so they're fudding it. Ransom Love's stupid enough to buy into this, but that's no suprise. This is the man who saw value in the corpse of SCO.
Sheesh, Microsoft is THRILLED about non-GPL open source. Just as Microsoft embraced and extended the internet, the macintosh-like GUI, and any other idea to get within 50 paces. Nothing new comes out of MS, they NEED stuff to copy. Open Source development could easily be their R&D department. Without the internet, their growth would already have peaked a few years ago, their whole .NET strategy is co-opting other people's ideas (the internet and Java).
If Microsoft was facing BSD right now in place of Linux, it would just fork it. Embrace and extend, bundle a BSD variant with Explorer and a Win32 API compatability library, and of course half of the office suite buried and hidden in the standard system libraries just like it's in windows now. And it would work.
But they can't do that with GPL code. So they're trying to get the Open Source movement to leave the GPL behind, so they have stuff they can fork off proprietary versions of.
The GPL is the open source movement's immune system against proprietary things like MS. Lots of people say that in an ideal world you don't need an immune system. Apparently, they live in a bubble.
Rob
Caldera was/is involved with webmin. Webmin is already under the BSDL.
That's http://www.webin.com if you wanted to know...
Maybe thier recent version of DRDOS will help ;) (seriously-- support for legacy apps may be a good thing for some potential customers).
0 1/05.03.html for their response to Microsoft's attack on the GPL.
You're forgetting that DR-DOS belongs to Lineo, formerly Caldera Thin Clients, independent from Caldera for a few years now.
Lineo, unlike Caldera, is gaining customers instead of losing them, has made Microsoft their bitch (see the DR-DOS settlement), and wholeheartedly believes in the GPL. See http://www.lineo.com/news_events/announcements/20
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Oh, I don't know about that. I'd say Jeff Merkey (one of the original designers of Netware and now confirmed Linux evangelist) has a lot better chance of actually delivering it.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Now explain why a version of LAPACK that they tuned the hell out of, and released the source to, isn't better. Trust me, if LAPACK was GPL'ed, scientists would still demand it, and the vendors would comply.
I don't think the GPL is anti-business.
Lets take Mutt as an example (only using it because I just happened to use Mutt as my MUA).
Say, I'm a company that want to do so customization of Mutt, and distribute it to my customers, but I don't want to distribute the source. It's under GPL, right? So, I can just go the the copyright holder(s), and give them a million dollars (or whatever it takes), and they relicense the software to me. No difference than how I would do it if I wanted to resell Eudora or Outlook.
From the author(s) point of view, they made money, and the people who are unwilling to pay them money, pay with their sourcecode.
NOw, if the software was under BSD, however, I could just take the software, and not compensate the Mutt people in any way.
GPL is really only anti-business insofar that business wants something for nothing. For the rest, the GPL is really no more restrictive than the normal M$ license.
Je ne parle pas francais.
And yet Microsoft's server marketshare is still increasing. All Linux is doing is doing is scavenging the meat left on the bones of dead and rotting Unix companies (which, except for Sun and possibly IBM, they all are), and somewhat of Novell. Back from the dead? It's just slowing their demise. There's nothing which shows Linux to be anything but a larger-than-average speedbump on the road to Microsoft's eventual world domination.
Cheers,
So if Love has had the same brilliant insight, why is this news?
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Linux and other Free Software made it pretty well long before the companies came to support them. They'l do well in the future too, even if the companies dies. they just won't get as much press, and some of the developers might not be able to hack as much anymore. But they won't _die_. There are too many people who likes to hack for that top happen...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
The GPL makes a ton of business sense. When looked at objectively it creates the requirement for businesses to constantly improve and innovate. If they do not, then they die. However such liscenses as the BSD liscense make a lot of sense to those who want to protect the interests of the company to the point where if they wanted to fuck over the customer the company has the ability to say "too bad". I think that this is a very dangerous thing coming from a company who has been so well known for Linux and GPL support over the years. What, if any code *COULD* Caldera re-liscense under the BSD liscense? Perhaps companies are correct to question the GPL. Perhaps we should look into providing alternatives that are friendly to corporations, consumers, and the collective body that has done all the work. I guess my *BIGGEST* problem is where so called "digital" law is at the moment allows anyone to "own" technology forever. Add "encryption" to it and it suddenly becomes a mortal sin to reverse engineer it. It's sad to see that people still don't get it, it's even sadder that people who are supposedly even the "leaders" still don't get it.
This guy is clearly nuts.
.sig will work... We all know about the goatse.cx link, so please don't waste our bandwidth!
YOU are clearly nuts if you think that WIN
The gravey train has rolled in, stayed around for a couple of years... and now its departing at an alarming rate.
I don't think Linux was just hype, since the userbase is still increasing at a high pace. We only got a sudden rush of interest from all kinds of companies with all kinds of ideas. Sure, those ideas are dying down... It's the novelty effect. Linux is not "new" anymore. It's the survival of the fittest.
I fail to see where Caldera becomes relevant in this story. Rather than worry about licensing flamewars, they should spend more ressources working on their product and promoting it a bit better. OpenLinux rocks, but no one ever hears about it.
I don't know of many, but Caldera is a driving force behind Linux - NetWare connectivity... if you need that at all...
However without viable business models to run off it the GPL is next to useless in the long run. Currently there are a number of companies trying business models around the GPL with varying success. If these companies stop support of products like Linux then these products will disappear from many of their current markets.
Face it- money makes the world go around, Caldera is a company who needs to make money to survive, if it does not survive then many contributers to GLP'd code will stop contributing - employees of Caldera will move on and might not have time in new job and users might switch to closed source.
Basically to survive I believe that the GPL must be business friendly even if this is not what it was designed for, to say otherwise is naive.
We didn't release our software as open source so that these companies can make money from it. If they can do so then that's fine, but don't pretend that there is a problem with the license if companies are unable to make money with GPLd software. There seems to be a growing perception that open source software is somehow failing because the companies involved in exploiting it are unable to make huge profits. Well that's sad but frankly, who cares.
Sig is taking a break!
We've been waiting for this one - the inflection point in the free software movement, all the arguments against it - "no support", "no direction", "no major applications", "no high level hardware installs" - have fallen by the wayside. Now, we get to the core, the fundamental premise - that software should have freedoms explicitly tied to it. Businesses, even Microsoft, have gladly used the BSD licensed code to their financial gain, but the GPL puts it right back onto them - they CAN'T use this stuff without the so-called "viral" effect. And boy does that burn their greedy little fingers! Commercial software houses I say unto you - deliver the goods, or die! The quality of free software is finally coming back to haunt you! Despite their recent comments, Microsoft have really clued into this - the reliability and managability improvements in W2K read like a grocery list of tech. supports complaints, but it's still not quite enough to stop the criticism's - I have still had more crashes (non fatal, but some that couldn't be recovered at the console) in 6 months on one hardware certified box, than on all my Linux servers and workstations combined in the last 2 years. Ha Ha!
The GPL isn't anti-business, and RMS never said that it was. He said it was anti-IP.
There's a HUGE difference. IP is the ability to own ideas. To control the actions of others, tell them what they're allowed to know.
Business is the action everyone takes when they put food on the table. Either if they're self-employed, or work for someone else.
There are hundreds of successful businesses that use or work with the GPL. Many consultants I know spend 75% or more of their time migrating businesses to unix servers and other non-proprietary software. I know of three tech companies basing custom hardware on RT-Linux (well, a RT flavor of Linux, not specifically RT-Linux).
The GPL isn't suited for megacorps - Stallman will tell you that, but it's not designed to sabotage them either. As long as they have a business method which doesn't involve squatting on IP, they'll be fine.
The GPL is as business neutral as the color blue. Many companies make great use of it, others don't. Many companies fail, many don't. The color blue doesn't play a part in this, and neither does the GPL. But CEOs sure grasp at straws to justify their company losing money... It's like that just can't admit that their incompotence had to do with it.
Heh. Let companies whine about how they don't want to embrace open source. They'll kill themselves, or relegate themselves to a niche market, and let other more flexible competitors take over.
Microsoft is already pushing itself out the server market. Many businesses are ditching MS in favor of the tried and true. They know propoganda when they see it. They know that having a GPLed webserver is irrelevant to its performance, they don't buy MS's FUD, but they recognize the fact that MS is sure spending a lot of time and money on that FUD.
Well, it'll work itself out in the end. MS may or may not still sell server-level OSes then, but their FUD won't change a thing.
Sure, those 'other companies' I talked about could rewrite IBMs code and end up with the same thing, basically. But they couldn't just do a cut & paste job. It's makes it harder for them to benefit. With the BSD license they wouldn't care about rewriting it, they'd just grab it.
If IBM releases something under the GPL they've prevented anyone from filing off the name and rereleasing it as a proprietary project. So any of those Redhat, or Suse, users will see that they're using something by IBM, a maker of "big iron". When they have serious computer needs, who are they going to talk to?
For instance, if you're using IBM's DB2 database on Redhat, and you decide that even a cluster of high-end PCs can't keep up anymore, who are you going to contact to get better hardware? SGI? Nope, IBM... because they've shown you their product and let you use it.
Now if DB2 has some neat feature that Oracle doesn't, Oracle can't simple copy that feature, they need to rewrite the whole thing. So it's IBM's protection to keep competitors from easily benefitting from their code, while still letting potential customers have all the access they need to fully evaluate and use the product.
And as for the Vatican? What kind of crack are you smoking?
Both licenses allow that. If IBM wrote the code, they can release it under any license they like, at any time. They can't revoke a license like the BSDL or GPL, but they can add a license. (Or lack thereof, with a proprietary release.)
It would mean that they can't fold Apache into that proprietary release, if it was GPLed. In that, you're right.
I didn't say they should release all their code, just that the code they do release should be GPLed.
Really, everyone should release GPLed code for everything, just to piss off MS who lives by stealing code.
The BSD license specifically allows companies to fork a project and close-source their fork.
That's the big difference between the licenses.
So how does the BSD license prevent a company from rolling an open source project into it's closed source?
I didn't say they could remove the BSD'd version, but they can get something for nothing. That both annoys me personally and makes bad business sense for the original contributor.
Most businesses I've worked with have liked the GPL, it grants them code to use, and means that if they release anything, nobody can proprietize it and start selling it.
They don't mind using it, but want their piece if someone is getting charged for it. (But, they'd rather just let everyone have it for free, instead of trying to collect royalties on some small program.)
Maybe your idea of free software is to waste your time writing something that the MSs of the world can use for free, even as they steamroll over the rights of the people.
This is precisely what the GPL is for, to make sure that only people who will contribute free software benefit from it. If someone can't be bothered to help the community, why should the community help them?
The only people who like the BSDL better are freeloaders and people who've been brainwashed into thinking the GPL is communist, or some other crap.
Really? How come all these discussions involve some BSD guy saying "Use BSD, it's like the GPL, but not communist!"
The GPL is voluntary. If you use GPLed code it's by choice.
Further, if you can't code something better than a GPLed sample, with the GPL to use as an example, you don't deserve to make any money from your code as it's obviously substandard.
Why would a company like IBM invest a ton of money into something with the BSD license? It'd just get used by some closed source company who didn't return anything to the community or to IBM.
However, if IBM uses the GPL then they have the ability to use any innovations they discover people have made to their code.
Say IBM releases a file-system. They GPL it and Linux starts using it, and some smart person comes up with a better caching algorithm, improving the performance drastically. Now IBM can take that improvement, rewrite it to obtain their own copyright, and fold it into their closed-source version of that file-system as well. Not only that, but when Linux is reviewed and that file-system is mentioned, IBM will be known as the creators. It's a win-win situation. They gave something away, to people who wouldn't have bought it anyways, and got something back, even if only in minor bug fixes.
Their competitors didn't get anything, unless they want to link to GPLed code written by IBM, and what kind of statement would that make to investors? Mainly that IBM produces better code than they could. Every version of the competitors product would be an advertisment for IBM.
However, if IBM used the BSD license their code would be quietly snapped up and used in their competitors products, without any compensation to IBM. That's the inexcusable (to stockholders) action.
Clearly, if you want to reap the benefits of open source, you need to make sure the source stays open. That's GPL.
Ok. This is off-topic, so I'll make it fast.
Apple did not steal their GUI from Xerox. This is one of the biggest perpetuated myths of all computing history. They were given a tour of the PARC facility, approved by Xerox, and licenced some of their technologies in exchange for a load of Apple stock.
Here's a link documenting the whole sordid affair.
The original Lisa UI was far superior in almost every way to the Xerox GUI; the underlying principles (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) were available on the Xerox UI but Lisa development was approved and began more than three months before the visit to Xerox. The Xerox brass weren't interested in the work being done there, and Apple jumped at the chance to licence it. Xerox disbanded their project and many of the developers (eg. Larry Tessler, Alan Kay, Jef Raskin) fled to Apple.
Xerox lost their lawsuit accusing Apple of infringing on their intellectual property. In fact, most of the stuff that Apple "stole" (such as the concept of a graphical interface and the mouse) were demonstrated by Douglas Englebart in the 1960s.
In any case, this isn't meant to undermine the work that Xerox did. They came up with some revolutionary ideas -- bitmapped displays, overlapping windows, cursors that reflect the current status of the machine -- but it was Apple that took these ideas, expanded on them, and came up with a truly useful and finished product.
Steve Jobs even admits that their core concepts came from Xerox. Here's what he said about their tour:
Interesting that the next company he founded, NeXT, was a huge pusher in the development of Objective-C, which has many Smalltalk-like features. And guess where Smalltalk originated. Xerox PARC has always been on the bleeding edge. Some of the most fantastic ideas in computing originated there, but generally, those ideas were improved upond and commercialised elsewhere. It's too bad PARC is finally being disbanded.
Of course, Caldera releasing their own software under a BSD license rather than the GPL license makes even less buisness sense since their competitors can then take the code, improve it and then not give Caldera the improvements back.
The only way the BSD license makes more sense than GPL for buisness reasons is if you're in the position of being the taking part, not the giving part.
I do expect Caldera to release yet another slew of licenses that arent compatible with any current ones, and making codesharing between stuff under those licenses impossible with everything else.
Please. Do. Not. Do. That.
BSD/X11, LGPL and GPL cover all the possible permutations of terms that are interesting. I have yet to see any license that diverges from the basic idea in them except in obnoxiously incompatible ways.
Which is a result of capitalism and free commerce ...
Hardly. If you said a mixed economy with heavily regulated commerce then you might have a point, but free commerce? Copyrights, patents, consumer protection laws, health and safety regulations, the whole concept of a limited liability company for that matter... the question for most people is which regulations are good and which are bad, not whether commerce should be "free" or not.
GNU software could have existed just as well under a BSD license. And Caldera would have been no worse off for it.
Windows could have existed under a BSD licence too. The question in both cases isn't whether it could have but whether it would have. All we know for sure in both cases is that it didn't.
But with apache, creating custom modifications for custom needs, BSD is great. I'm sure one of the reasons Apache is so widely used is that It can be easily used in the business world.
You can apply custom modifications to GPL software too. Anyone you give the code to you have to give the source to as well, and they're free to redistribute further. That's it though, customising software to your own (or your clients') needs, and charging to do so, is perfectly within the scope of the GPL.
Selling GPL'd software to a mass market presents problems, because your first customer can redistribute to other potential customers. Selling individually customised versions of GPLd software, however, works perfectly well.
It's not so much that the statistic is wrong as that it's meaningless.
He said "Approximately 95% of software developed", how do you count that to start with? Is Windows one item of software, or do we count every separate little application or utility that comes with it? Individual library routines? Or are we counting lines of source code, or bytes of object code? Or the time spent developing it?
For the inhouse software are we counting every macro and script? Microsoft presumably have plenty of little inhouse pieces of software that aren't intended for distribution that they use in their development process. They might even have more "items" of software the are purely inhouse than they have for distribution.
I think you could make it 95% if you wanted to, or pretty much anything else.
I'm not sure why developers prefer the GPL over BSD ... no wait... I do; I'm a developer. Why a business would hire coders to make GPL software _is_ beyond me though. The only rational there is they're looking for long term benefits to the computing world or they don't know dick diddly about business.
Presumably you'd think the same about a business hiring coders to make BSD licensed software too though?
The GPL can be used as a tool by anti-business developers to stop businesses from benefiting from their work.
Only in the same sense that anti-business home owners can stop businesses from taking over their homes for office space. Not even to that extent in face, GPLd software, including GNU software, is utilised by plenty of businesses and the number is growing.
The requirements of the GPL are basically that if you distribute the software to anyone you must also provide them with a copy of the source to that software and you may not place restrictions on them that prevent them from distributiong the software and source further.
It does not require you to distribute the software, or changes to the software, to anyone. It does not require you to distribute sourec to anyone unless you distribute the software to them.
In other words, there is nothing in the GPL that prohibits you from making changes inhouse and keeping them inhouse. If you don't want to distribute the code externally then the GPL doesn't require anything at all.
So what you're saying is that IF people had chosen to develop programs under the BSD licence that in fact they released under the GPL, that then Caldera would have been able to take that software and use it? You might as well say that Caldera could have used all that software if the authors had chosen to donate it directly to Caldera; since it didn't happen it doesn't help. The reason Caldera CAN redistribute that software is because it IS released under the GPL.
The BSD licence and the GPL have in fact made quite different impacts on the world. There is no evidence to suggest that if the GPL had not existed that all software (or substantially all software that Caldera wish to avail themselves of) that is released under the GPL would instead have been released under the BSD licence.
Apple, and Microsoft, and thousands of small start-ups. And you, and I if we want, too.
I fail to see why anybody except the 'Anti-Micro$oft' fanatic brigade' should care.
The point is that more people would be able to use their code, not less. If their problem with the GPL is that other people can distribute the code for free then the "problem" they would have with the BSD licence would be even worse.
So GPL is the only free open source license out there?
It seems a BSD style license would've had the exact same effect.
If GPL was the only licence out there then your second sentence might make sense, but it isn't. There is "a BSD style licence", it's called the BSD licence, and it hasn't "had the exact same effect" as the GPL, so what do you mean by saying it "would've" done? Would have if it wasn't for the fact that it didn't?
Perhaps surprisingly, that doesn't seem to be what they're saying.
From the article :
The question is, if GPL is the preferred "development-model" licence, what will other licences be used for? Are they going to have a "development-model" licence and a stagnation-model licence, or what? Are they planning on releasing software as GPL whilst it's still in development, then a different licence when it's completed? I don't think it's clear what they're proposing but it doesn't seem to be that they're not going to use GPL any more. I'm not sure that what they're proposing is clear to them either though.
IBM doesn't need to rely on other people's innovations to their code. They are the largest patent holder/producer in the world.
IBM collects Billions every year in royalty payments for IP. That revenue would NOT be made up in any fashion by making all their IP GPL. As a stockholder, I'd initiate a suit as fast as I could call my lawyer if IBM GPL'd their IP.
Some, yes as it is beneficial. All? No way.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Hasn't anyone _actually_ read the GNU manifesto ?
The GPL was not devised to provide a business opportunity. It was devised to preserve freedom.
Getting involved with GPL'ed code, and then saying "gee, the GPL isn't a very business friendly" is totally ridiculous.
Absolute statements are never true
ZDNet's reporter, Mary Jo Foley, notes that in line with Microsoft's recent critism:
Then we go on with: Down with the GPL? Well... kinda... not really: Spin, Ransom, spin. You might not ever get that tail, but you're making a lot of noise and putting on a fine show. ZDNet's reporters, with all the technical calibre of Dog Fancy Magazine, must surely appreciate the effort.If they release under the GPL then any GPL based company can and should use their code. If they release under BSD then Apple and Microsoft also get free use of their code.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate, in terms of discussing the number of programmers who would be employable under a paradigmn shift, to consider the number of programmers currently assigned to inhouse work vs those doing "for public, retail release"? Perhaps the number of programmer-hours billed? Rather than lines of code?
Maybe Caldera's next move is to buy BeOS?
He said "selling fruit", not "picking fruit". You confuse commodities with the service industry. But then again, programming *is* a service industry...
Thank goodness each _developer_ who creates a project gets to decide its license. The GPL vs (Insert Other License Here) battles are not won or lost with distros, they are won or lost on _new_ _innovative_ projects started by developers. As long as developers decide what license their software goes under, and developers remain the source of linux's strength, I won't worry what CEOs are mulling about!
Whenever you're speaking in this forum, it might be a good idea not to appropriate the term Free Software, complete with capitalization, and then claim that it's got nothing to do with the GPL. The term Free Software (as opposed to free software) connotes a very particular meaning among /.ers in the know.
The GPL protects the software commons in a way that the BSD license cannot do. Period. The BSD license can not prevent someone from hijacking the code from the user downstream. If Linus had released the Linux kernel under a BSD license, we could already have IBM Linux*, Sun Linux*, and a thousand other locked-up codebases, not talking with eachother, and with nothing making it possible to bridge the gap because none of them would have to share their changes with anybody. Actually, Linux development probably would have suffered crib death, because who needed another UNIX workalike except the FSF-inspired community? Same thing goes for all of the GNU tools, which is probably more significant to the issue of interoperability.
Please note: I am not flaming the BSD license - release your software under whatever license you want. But don't pretend the GPL hasn't been a significant factor in the development of Free Software (in the RMS definition of the term), because it couldn't have happened without it. It might not be a cause, but it's certainly a catalyst, just as cheap hardware probably wasn't a cause. I personally think the initial cause was frustration with vendor lock-in in a supposedly "open" system like UNIX. The achievement of critical mass is a much thornier question.
I think Caldera's never really been happy with having to be more-or-less compatible with everyone else's Linux distribution, anyway. They've always struck me as a company that would be quite glad to be able to lock in their market segment.
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*I don't actually think IBM and Sun would have released versions of Linux in this scenario. They're just examples of heavyweight players that could have taken the community's freely-provided code and hijacked it to make it incompatible with everyone else's.
Right...
And herein is exhibited the difference between Open Source and Free Software. The GPL, written by Stallman to protect Free Software, says nothing about a guarantee of the ability to make money off software. That's totally orthogonal to the GPL and Free Software. They don't care.
But everybody swarming around the Open Source movement, which has been using the GPL for so long now more or less because it was most convenient, are now shocked *shocked* to find that software based on the GPL, itself, may not be a sufficient business model. Yeah, so? Who ever said it was?
If you want to make money off software in which the source is merely *viewable*, call it "Open Source" or "Shared Source" or some other damned thing, but don't pretend it is Free Software and then get your panties in a knot when you realize you will have trouble integrating with GPL software (well, if you refuse to do it "correctly"). Hey Mr. Businessman: GPL was not written for you, sorry; it was written for average joe citizen and consumer. Yes, that may be sad, because there are indeed some very cool people trying to run Open Source businesses. But if you intend to make money from software *itself*, as opposed to services and t-shirts, well, I guess then your choice has to be to make up a new license.
Sorry this sounds rantish. I'm really not an FSF troll...but I don't see why people are so amazed about this. It was inevitable that people running software businesses would realize that they couldn't capitalize on GPL-based software.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You mean I can get print outs?
How we know is more important than what we know.
is not that someone can make money from code that's licensed under the GPL. for me, the value of everything the FSF has done is that I have a computer with an operating system, utilities, and applications that are free. no one can do anything to take away my right to use the software on my system as i see fit. if a hunk 'o hardware doesn't work with my machine, I have the right to modify my copy of the gnu/linux software I'm running to make it work. the obligation to make that source code available is the main reason we've made it this far.
karma? feh.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Okay, so the poster used the wrong phrase. So what? The point is that Linux brought Unix to the mainstream, and one of the reasons for this is the GPL.
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I think the idea behind Gnu is that although it may not make as much short-term business sense, it makes long-term freedom sense. There have been plenty of examples in history when the ethical decision isn't a business decision, but ultimatly what's good for society is good for business.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Webmin was released under the BSD license from the start and was then acquired by Caldera. Caldera left the license used by Webmin alone and continues to contribute to the project.
Webmin is included in most of Caldera's ``server'' Linux offerings and can be installed on almost every UNIX derivative.
Most of Webmin's modules are licensed under the GPL rather than BSDL.
The URL is www.webmin.com/webmin and information about Caldera's involvement and the bit about the license is under the Introduction to Webmin page.
Since practically all of the software they ship has been licensed to them under the GPL, LGPL, BSD or similar free licensing, they can't really help but support the GPL. It's not like they write their own kernel, windowing system, office apps, development platform, GUI toolkit or.. well.. anything i'm aware of. What software do Caldera produce? Maybe the GPL-hardcore need a new un-american, anti-business, communist pinko wife-beating child-porno drug-dealing gun-toting high-school-shooting super-mega-GPL that includes the clause that it is a violation of the license to distribute this product with any other product that does not also conform to the GPL.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I only half agree. As an example our cars can't go as fast today as they used too. The average speed hasn't improved for a decade.... many other aspects have continued to improve but other than safety features and climate controls and gas mileage, the rest of the crap is just frivolous. The almost perfect car could almost be a reality today if the marketing droids from the automakers and oil companies would get their heads out.
There will come a point when the speed and feature set on a computer is so complete that the average user won't need anything better and the upgrade cycle will slow to a crawl. Unless the cpu makers can build in obsolecence/failure at 37000 miles just after the warrranty runs out like they did with my wife's car. Her car is fast enough apparently gets good enough mileage for the moment anyway and has air.. what else does she really need.
"Yes, installing GNUOffice 2031 will become unskilled labor. But newer technology will require newer software. Always."
Ok but the point I was trying to make wasn't about coders I was talking about support....
The majority of Big Gun software we Linux users use was written by the FSF before Redhat was even thought of or by the Apache Group or the Samba team etc. RedHat's (I use Redhat as an example and mean every one else) success may have introduced more coders to the movement but Redhat doesn't really put out all that much code. Even the code that they do put out is being written by guys who'd probably have written it without a Redhat paycheck. I think we'll all agree that Linux stock prices ot a little out of whack which really helped build up some momentum in the movement. But let's look at the typical Redhat vs Debian holywar, arguably Debian is doing it just as well as Redhat without the underlying financial drive.
Let's say company A develops a Full Sensory Virtual Interaction System and of course being the first, charges money for it and is closed source. They make a fortune, get cocky and become hated. Open Source hackers everywhere immediately become facinated and start hacking to support this new hardware. If they license their efforts under the GPL, sooner or later they will put the original company's software division out of business. Who would pay for someone's sourceless something when they get it for free and get the source? Eventually their installer and app will work so flawlessly that it no longer requires any support. Company A continues to improve the hardware and the hackers continue to improve/keep up and support is dead. So yes there will be small pockets of time when support is required to usher in the new stuff but it will be fleeting in the big picture. Writing the software for the new stuff will always exist and work will always be done on the old stuff since perfection isn't truly possible but no one will need support given enough time. That's why a GPL'ed company will fail. That's also why Microsft will fail and the GPL will survive. I can't believe I've become so fanatical these days... Must stop reading Stallman.
Wait here's a good example, the typewriter. There used to be shops that you'd bring your typewriter to get fixed. Eventually manual typewriters got so cheap and so reliable that the support for things dried up. Sure those electric jobs came along and they needed a whole new set of support for awhile till they get replaced (I know I have a few of those customers too) by the pc and by Brother. It has to stop some day. Nowadays who really works on Brother Word Processors? Come on they're so cheap you just throw it out when it wears out and get a new one.
G
"Love said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense."
He's right about that.... As linux becomes more perfect, the need for support-based companies will go away. Imagine a day when you drop in your fav linux dvd, boot your computer, and it asks you want you want installed (or it just reads your mind). It partions and installs perfectly, auto detected all your hardware without a hitch and comes with perfectly written tutorials about everything. Your data is all stored in one area and a cron job backs it up automagically with a one button restore. The hardware will be so cheap it'll be disposable so if you're having hardware probs you'll throw out the old and buy new, restore your data and be back up in minutes. Who will need a support contract? Who would hire a consultant for install or data recovery help? Once wireless comes of age we won't need anyone pulling cat27 it'll just work.
Every database/app that can be imagined will already be written, listed at sourceforge and freshmeat and of course be under the GPL. Don't like the way your accounting program works? There are millions of variations of the same app to choose from with an awesome chooser that let's you drill down to find the one that solves your particular problem the best.
As long as there are good coders willing to work for free, this scenario will get closer and closer to reality. There is an optimal UI, we don't know what it is yet but we keep getting closer overall. There is perfect code... improve upon the typical Hello World app, can't right? Why? It's perfect. Now I'm not saying that the kernel or the interpreter or the hardware drivers are perfect, but Hello World can be since it's so simple. Larger apps are becoming more perfect every day and someday in the far-flung future we will have the perfect word processor, OS, DB, etc. We'll never actually achieve perfection but we'll get close enough.
Every time I write a little bash script to automate some little BS thing and I share it with others I'm putting another nail in Microsoft's coffin since they're in the business of selling software. At the same time I'm also putting a much smaller and slower acting nail in Redhat's coffin, who thinks they're in the business of selling support. Redhat and the others are literally working themselves out of a job.
None of this is bad the end users... we want free software that is perfect. Us IT people will be looking for work sooner than you might think though.
G
> They certainly must honor the GPL for their software that is already under it
Not necessarily. They absolutely do have to keep anything they've released so far under the GPL, but new versions could be released under a new license, even a proprietary one.
They can only do this with the permission of all the copyright holders (of which there might be many if there are a lot of developers), but for stuff they own the copyrights for, they can do whatever they want.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
Basically, you offer the code under an alternative proprietary license, for a nice juicy fee, as Trolltech does with QT. People who want to live in Unfreedonia are welcome to pay for the privilege. That way you also get some income to help support free software development.
Of course, when random hackers send you GPLed patches, you can't just merge them into your private codebase; that was why Trolltech feared that the GPL would fork QT.
The correct response, however, is to pay those hackers a little bit for the copyright to their patches...
Fixing copyright
They also were instrumental in encouraging word perfect to port, oracle to port, and novell to port apps to linux...thanks in no small part to Ray Noorda (former Novell Pres/CEO) who started or was deeply involved in Caldera getting off the ground
meh.
Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL.
GPL==Free Software; GPL!=Open Source Software.
And there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding by each of the three camps about the others. Let me clarify for the public good:
You can't base a business around Free Software and the GPL because it's not designed to be a business model or a way to make money. That is why companies like Red Hat will struggle in the long run, because they can only make money through "added value" crap like tech support and shrink-wrapped product, which won't be nearly enough to make up for their R&D costs. And you can't take a GPL project and let businesses overtake the majority of development and expect it to stay afloat and remain free, because businesses need to make money.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
> Does anyone else think the Caldera icon looks like a blue mickey mouse on a balloon?
> > you mean im not the only one? phew. no matter how many times i look at it, i always see it as mickey mouse before i see it as a C.
Disney hath control over thou inter-associaction brain functions...
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
I find it just a little ironic that companies are belly-aching about how a viable business model cannot be built around GPL'd code.
It seems to me that an organization like the Free Software Foundation did not create the GPL in order for corporations to make money. From the FSF webpage, "the Free Software Foundation concentrates on development of new free software---and on making that software into a coherent system which can eliminate the need to use proprietary software." In the FSF's words, "proprietary" means software that is not free. So, the GPL is a license created to foster the development of free software, which is not necessarily conducive to profitable business models.
Microsoft's and Caldera's mistake: assuming that a company cannot build itself around GPL'd code. At face value, I have argued this to be true. However, the support and services market is far more profitable. Therefore, I would argue that a company can be profitable by marketing support and services for their free software. In that way, it should be possible to build a viable business model around GPL'd code.
(Fruitless M$ slam: Microsoft would rather do both: charge you for unrefined software, then charge you to get support for their bugs)
IBM is a large contributor to open source products. Their ROI? Marketable experience and the reputation as a supporter of free and open source software. I'm sure someone else could come up with more examples of companies that are able to be profitable from GPL'd code. So, when you do pay for something, pay someone who is going to give back to the community.
"Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL"
WTF? Open Source != GPL for the 1 gazillionth time. The BSD license is still open source. And it does make more sense in the business sense. It always has. I love the BSD license and it is great for products like apache. Some things you just don't need to sell though. Not too many businesses would need to fix up a linux kernel for a software product, therefore GPL is fine. But with apache, creating custom modifications for custom needs, BSD is great. I'm sure one of the reasons Apache is so widely used is that It can be easily used in the business world.
Microsoft isn't attacking Open Source at all. Especially when they use BSD code in some of their TCP implementations on 2000. They however are attacking GPL. Yeah, it may not be the best for business, but that's my point. Choose the license that fits. There are some apps that may be better off using the BSD license. But I don't think Linux is one of them.
At least now, Microsoft sees Linux as a threat. It's good publicity to have this in the news all the time. When people really investigate it, they will find the truth. GPL has it's pitfalls. You may want to modify code, but can't cause you don't want to release the changes. But hey, that's better then not having the code at all
I thought the GPL was a fairly tough license that is difficult to circumvent.. so how can the take a GPL product and re-license it as something else.. is it legal???
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I'm glad to see people are accually starting to understand this. I have been saying this for 3+ years now and people tell me I'm crazy. I guess I need to get a clueless title like "CEO" before they'll believe me.
I think I'm going to go shoot up a school somewhere.
Want to control your intellectual property, write it in Perl. That way, nobody else will be able to understand your code. Jason.
Does anyone else think the Caldera icon looks like a blue mickey mouse on a balloon?
you mean im not the only one? phew. no matter how many times i look at it, i always see it as mickey mouse before i see it as a C.
The GPL has never been the foundation of a company that has been successful in the long run. Cygnus, for example, was only marginally profitable, and only after it adopted other licensing models (e.g. eCOS) and began to sell packaged software. Red Hat has lost many millions, and its own 10-Q statement (look it up on the SEC's Edgar system) warns that the company does not know how or whether its business model is viable. Eazel just laid of 60% of its staff (which is a shame; they're bright people who do good work!). If Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera, says that the GPL is open source's "weakest point," it only makes sense that he's determined that his business is also suffering due to the GPL.
Again, if you look at the history that led to the GPL (How many here have read the book Hackers? Or actually spoke with Richard Stallman at the time of development of the GPL as I did? At the time, he was much more frank about his intentions than he is today), you will recognize that it is not designed to make a viable business model possible. In fact, it's designed to undercut businesses, destroy their markets, and reduce programmers' wages (see the GNU Manifesto, which explicitly states this goal). I know that many folks who have bought into the idealistic (but misleading) language at the start of the GPL may find it hard to believe this -- so much so that I fear that this post will be moderated down in denial even though it's not a flame. But we really must wake up and smell the coffee: the GPL is anti-business and anti-programmer. There are other models that are better. The MIT X license and the BSD license are good examples. We should consider them.
--Brett Glass
Publishing code under the BSD license, on the other hand, is truly giving. To everyone. Unconditionally. Which is what giving is about.
--Brett Glass
Now, I'm not a manager, but I think that GPL is quite tough to create a business model round. How would one overcome loss of (invoiced) customers? If I am a manager, how do I control my business processes when the outside world is an uncertain threat (ie fork)?
--
Bizar technology?
Can you prove this figure of 95%, I'm sceptical, I'd believe something around 60%. Do you know why? Well, it's usually big businesses - ie multinationals, fortune 100's - who own inhouse software. The small retaillist does not, he either buys software, or he develops his own software product (ISV). The retail sector is far more bigger than you might think, 95% is simply inaccurate, it might work for the 'mainstream', but the outside world is ever bigger than the rest.
--
Bizar technology?
My point exactly. Don't they just pay Oracle to manage everything? Oracle is a company that has some VERY high end cool stuff for large businesses. They know very well what is their product, ERP's and large database applications for companies like Boeing, GM, and the like.
Larry Elison wakes up every morning and asks himself what is his product and who is his client. He does not waver... and that is why he is successful. If their database got outsourced they'd have no problems... why? Because their database isn't their product. Their product runs on top of their database. Their ability to write applications customized for large corporations and their wealth of apps is what at THIS moment keeping them ahead of the Free/Liberty Software world.
However, just give us a few more years.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
GPL'ing your code only makes sense if you don't derive the majority of your revenue from selling software licenses. But the GPL makes huge sense for companies for whom software is overhead (stuff that doesn't directly bring in money).
For example, you sell widgets, but you thought ahead and created a widget design, inventory, and shipping system. It helps you be more efficient, but it also costs you a lot of money to develop and maintain. Companies are starting to outsource their applications to the world, and are finding out that it's cheaper, and other's who are interested contribute back. In the end they get better software.
Competition? It's not an issue, because again, they compete selling widgets, not writing software. Many company owners are realizing that software development was taking them away from their core competency and are looking to GPL.
Now, say I'm a company that has done some deep wizardry in speech recognition. We wrote it. It works and people are going to pay us big bucks for it. It would follow that said software would NOT be a good candidate for the GPL.
Just re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar. It spells it all out plain and simple. GPL: good for a lot of things - Still room for pay-license software.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
I am a linux customer. I buy distributions regularly. I buy them for the convenience of a cdrom and the odd chance that I might have an installation problem.
My business is to provide technical solutions to business problems. I don't sell distributions, I sell services. My use of linux is confined to solving problems using the platform. My clients use UNIX for the same thing. These are fortune 250 and the occasional e-business company. They don't make money off the software. They make money by providing a service or selling a product. Of all of the businesses in the market, these comprise 99% of the total. These are the customers that should be foremost in the community's mind.
GNU/Linux is a superb platform to address a commodity computing need or for solving problems. Stable, fast, low maintainence. You build your solution on top of a proven platform. Because of this, linux is enjoying tremendous growth.
What bothers me is that Ransom is largely addressing his needs and the needs of commercial software developers, not necessarily his customers. Myself and my customers need support. They need standards. They need a product that gets better, faster, more secure, and more stable over time. And it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. They need to know that if something goes wrong with a machine, they can call up a vendor and have it fixed. Whether they do it through a proprietary license or the GPL largely does not matter to them. It is in their best interest, whether they know it or not, for the code that they buy support for to be GPL, because it gives them the most options.
IBM gets it. They are supporters of the Linux because they can sell hardware, services, and support to help the 99% of businesses to get things done. They aren't in the news about the GPL, because they have aligned their interests with their customers. Sure, they still sell proprietary software, and they do it for Linux. More power to them. But I think that they know that computing services as services provided by computers become commoditized, their revenue from that sofware will dwindle.
So let Ransom Love ramble on about making money on commercial software. He doesn't understand where his own business needs to position itself. For that he and his shareholders will pay dearly.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
What does BSD have anything to do with Caldera? The original point was that without the GPL, Caldera wouldn't have an "OpenLinux" product to be selling, a point you missed entirely.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
The GPL licenes requires you to share your source code.
If all of the code that is now GPL code had been originally distributed under BSD, much of the 'new and improved' code would have never gotten out of the companies that took advantage of the original software. Consider, for example how Apple (and, before them, NeXT) have kept a noticable portion of their code private.
I acknowledge that some NeXT and Apple code that was entirely their own might not have needed to be GPLed (much would have, because of the viral nature of the GPL).
In any case: Just think, for a moment, about how much of the NeXT code has (not) made it back out to the public. I believe that much the same would have happened to some of the best Linux improvements if Linux had been released under the GPL.
We also have to consider the infections nature of the GPL idea. There is a lot of code that was released to the public (Darwin), not because it was required under the GPL, but because people were used to the freedom that GPL access gave them and supplied social pressure on suppliers to put an equivalent license on their own code.
I think that I'm trying to say that the GPL has some dogmatic force behind it that does not exist in the space of the BSD's presumptive concessions to commercial interests.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Whether Caldera capitalises on GPL software is beside the point. He is saying that, quite rightly, distributing thier own software as GPL is not good business sense. Of course its not, you don't have to be a genius to see that.
However, give Caldera credit, they are not saying that Open Source is bad and they won't do open source stuff because they won't make as much money etc etc.
What they _are_ saying is that the GPL isn't right for them, but they still like the idea of open source, just under a more restrictive license.
Let me emphasize this. Microsoft says Open Source is bad full stop. Caldera says Open Source is good, but the GPL probably isn't good for commercially released Open Source.
---
James Sleeman
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Don't see why you were modded down there. But...
Just because they use GPL for some things, doesn't mean that they must use GPL for everything.
If GPL suits the model for some of thier software (only Caldera can say what that is), or if they use GPL stuff as part of that software, then they will release software as GPL.
If a BSD style license works for a different software, they are perfectly entitled and sensible to use it.
Turning a profit is not bad, quite the oppposite.
---
James Sleeman
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I'm not too informed when it comes to the different licenses, but it seems M$ made a bit of a point. However, It seems to me that it's not entirely true. Yes, the code must be released and free and all that good stuff. They seem to miss the fact that a lot of the comercial systems seem to sell user support and hard copies of the system. Not only will the average user want a physical copy of their OS (once the Linux/BSD world becomes easier to use), but the average user won't be able to install their own hardware, etc, etc. I mean, come on! We've all read tech support calls from hell :)
Stallman says add to this code and you are one of us.
Gates says use this code and you belong to us.
This is not a signature.
Warning: Header is a goatse.cx link (shudder)
Seriously... look at the post. MS is attacking open source at it's weakest point: the GPL. The GPL is -not- about open source for crying out loud. You would think the Slashdot community would have jumped on this ASAP, or heck, even the editors should have commented on the article before posting it.
... no wait... I do; I'm a developer. Why a business would hire coders to make GPL software _is_ beyond me though. The only rational there is they're looking for long term benefits to the computing world or they don't know dick diddly about business.
We (should) all know the GPL is not about open source. If you don't know this you really really should read more of Stallman's writings.
"Open Source" to me means BSD -- seriously. BSD licences are "strong" open source licesneses; the GPL is the "strong" Free Software licenese.
I'm not sure why developers prefer the GPL over BSD
Dude i thought I was the only one! SOMEONE ELSE SEES THE BLUE MICKEY! SOMEONE ELSE SEES THE BLUE MICKEY!
...sob...
This could be an interesting test case for the GPL business model, but to paraphrase The Matrix: On the other hand, Caldera probably doesn't have a lot to lose - there are a lot of distributions out there, so perhaps having a modified BSD licensed one may be the gimmick they need to find a viable niche.
Unless they licensed it under BSD but then didn't bother releasing it to the OS community.
:wq
Really? Ever understood what's really important when building software? it's not the IMPLEMENTATION. It's the DESIGN, the algorithms behind the implementation. And these are not stored in GPL-ed code, but in research documents, patents, whatever. If MS wants to get some designs implemented, they get the research documents, bring that to their huge staff of university graduated programmers and let them implement these designs, these algorithms. They don't need BSD licensed code, nor will they use it. Why? Because code copied/pasted from a random source.cpp is not maintainable, not fitting a design: it's not a 1:1 transform of the design to implementation, they way people make software. If the design changes you can't change the code at once when you just copy/pasted it from a random sourcefile. When you DID follow the general rules of thumb, you know where and how a certain designblock is implemented and can see where and how it should be changed to match the changed design. It works against you when you just steal an implementation of a lookalike design.
Besides that, MS has a clear policy that no programmer is allowed to use open sourced (whatever license) code, without permission.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
How is the BSD license more economically-sound than the GPL as far as making money off open-source? Wouldn't it just let a company like Microsoft use the code however they want?
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Hear! Hear! Despite bleating to the contrary, this point probably makes the GPL the friendliest license to companies that are trying to develop and sell Free Software. It's the one license that guarantees that your competitors have to deal with you on a level playing field. They can't just extend your work and then lock their improved source away.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
But businesses are not the only possible sources of software. The FSF isn't a business, but they've written a lot of good software. Linus Torvalds wasn't a business when he wrote the first version of the Linux kernel, but it was delivered, too. Debian isn't a business, but Debian GNU/Linux is a damn fine distribution. The Apache Foundation isn't a business, either, and they absolutely rule the web. There's a huge amount of good software that's written by users to fullfill their individual needs and then given away as Free Software to benefit others. It's at least as valid a development model as the more traditional for profit development system, largely because the users know exactly what they need, while outside developers don't necessarily know as well.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
And it is the GPL which governs most of the software that Caldera does use. So indeed, I ask you all, "wtf?"
Italics(tm) used strictly for emphatic purposes. No similarity to any other emphatic style is intended, either expressed or implied. Patent spending, no restrictions may apply, valid where prohibited, all rights worth crap.
===
Of course GPL is bad for business. (that is if you define 'bad for business' as 'the software industry making less money') I don't think many would argue that. As nature abhors a vacuum, OpenSource software abhors corporate culture and commercialism. So what. We don't need them anyhow. The point is good software, free software--not emulating our commercial predecessors. Given enough time, all of the software most people need will be available under some OSI approved license and the software industry will no longer have its precious virtual market of information goods. Sure, there will always be programmers to tailor to specific needs and write in-house code (which is already 75% of the job market IIRC), but the big software house is a dying breed.
Hint for Calera/RedHat/etc. managers: think services, not products or licensing
"This open-source software is great, much better than the proprietary stuff. What it needs is more proprietary stuff!"
And they wonder why they're losing to Redhat?
You can disagree with Redhat or Microsoft's ideologies, but at least they make sense, which is more than I can say about Caldera...
How ironic. You attempt to lambaste another poster and show off your ignorance.
X-Windows was created in 1984 at MIT as part of Project Athena. Its name, X Window System, is because it was based upon an earlier windows systems, "W" for the "V" research project at Stanford. (References: here, here, here, and here.)
If you are going to attempt to be kewl RootAksess, might I suggest, you do some research first?
Some open-source advocates considered Microsoft Corp.'s recent public flaming of the GNU General Public License equivalent to criticizing motherhood and apple pie. But not Ransome Love, CEO of Caldera Systems
Wow. Now, I've heard of some people with cool names before. But Ransome Love, damn. That's a just a cool name.
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
... which is not the same as the Open Source movement... so how can GPL be the Open Source movement's weakest point when it's not even a part of it?
The hell I do! I haven't bemoaned that fact once! And no flaming, either-- just check, no other posts in this article at all.
Oh. Something just occurred to me-- I guess by "y'all", you weren't referring to me. Damn, I never did understand Texans.
What I find most disturbing about this is that it's basically a no-news piece (maybe they're going to adopt a different license, they think it's a good idea, but that's about all they say) about a Linux company which comes off making MS sound like they've got some really good points about Open Source and the GPL, when all Mundie really said is that you have to sell things in order to make money (things like software, as opposed to services based on that software); and he makes an attempt to co-opt into the hype of "open source" with this "shared source". It's fucking weird as others have posted here, since they owe their livelihood to the Linux kernel and the GPL it's licensed under.
It's also disturbing to hear Love agreeing, or being portrayed as agreeing (he probably does agree) with a statement that claims to be committed to intellectual property, as though the GPL could get anywhere without copyright. It all really means commitment to MS' version of IP, yada yada..
By the by, I just want to say that I am SICK and TIRED of hearing the phrase "great software". Great means you paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon when you're young and hungry and sell it for not a lot, and when you're old and rich you splash a few dashes of paint on a plate and sell it for a cool mil. Fuck your great software!
My own feeling is that there's a lot of software out there yet to be written. If Caldera can't or won't make shipping a Linux distro work for them, they should shift entirely, rather than attempt to create some Frankenstein out of tons of different licensing schemes.
So, when's rms going to demand that Caldera specify they're distributing BSD/Linux?
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
I didn't really understand this answer. The question was how BSD would be better than GPL. I can't see how your reply has any bearing on wheather said code is BSD or GPL or any other license. As long as you can read the source, you can extract the design. Or at least, the license on the code is not what stops you from understanding the design.
If MS wants to get some designs implemented, they get the research documents, bring that to their huge staff of university graduated programmers and let them implement these designs, these algorithms. They don't need BSD licensed code, nor will they use it.
This is plain wrong. The TCP/IP implementation in all Windows versions are based on the original BSD TCP/IP implementation.
Also, a lot of places, the code is actually a lot better to copy than the design. For instance with anything security related it is better to copy the entire source since a lot of breaches are caused by bad implementation.
More generally, it's better to copy the entire source if it's a complete 'piece', and has a good interface (this would be called a component today, but a library 10 years ago).
M.
There's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modifying the source. The only thing the GPL says is that you have to give the source to whomever you give the binary. And that the recipient then can do whatever they like with that source. There's nothing preventing you from charging a million dollars for that binary.
The Apache-example you gave seems a bit weird. If you make a custom modification for custom need, that sounds like a single web-site (or at least custom-built ones ("site" her might be embedded)). And there's nothing in the GPL preventing you from doing that either. You just have to give the customer the source.
M.
Nobody has this right. Not Microsoft, not RedHat, not Caldera. About the only ones who have this right are Stallman, Debian, and *BSD. Open Source and Free Software are not f'ing business models.
Of course no one is going to make money selling the code. This should surprise no one, nor should anyone care. Its not about making money. Its about making code. The BSD license says, "If you find the code useful, great!" The GPL says, "If you find the code useful, share!"
So then RedHat, et al, come along and say, "If you find the code useful, give us money!" But they are having problems reconciling the "share" the with "make money". This is not a weakness of the code nor the license, nor the nonexistent "open source business model". It is a weakness of their business model. Of course they will fail, but the code will still be there long after they are gone.
If they had truly understood Open Source and/or Free Software to begin with, they would have gone the same route as FreeBSD: Non Profit Corporation.
Hearing about GPL being the weakest point of Linux from corporations makes me feel that GPL is actually the strongest point.
I wouldn't think of it in terms of what have they done, but rather who uses it. One of my favorite bands is Anti-Flag. Now, regardless of what they have done for punkrock, they are important to me, and if they change, I will care, while you may not.
His attitude seems to be, "Sure, I can use the code without reciprocation if it's another license." That's the whole point of the GPL -- to get the changes release back to the community for everyone's benefit. I quit using Caldera in 1998 and haven't missed it. I think I'll stick with the free and open guys!! Goodbye, Caldera, I never knew thee well. Won't miss ya either..
https://jamiesonbecker.com
As much as I hate the overused phrase "get it", it's pretty clear that Caldera doesn't get it. The most telling point in this regard is Love's comment on IBM in the Newsforge article:
"Linux is just a facilitator to a firm like IBM. It allows them to sell more hardware and services.... Linux doesn't make the company any money, but Linux support makes money, and hardware makes money. Linux helps them sell more hardware."
That's exactly the point. The days when you can make money selling software are coming to an end. From here on out, the money will be made on support, services, customization, and hardware. Even Microsoft seems to have grasped this, but Caldera is still trying to find a way to make money selling proprietary software.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
As a non-Caldera Linux user, I'm curious to know for what contributions to the Linux community Caldera is directly responsible. I'm sure they have a whole host of server and desktop applications bundled with their distro, but would this shift in license preference affect the software we commonly use? The article wasn't helpful in mentioning how this would affect any software of any type developed by Caldera.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
But the beauty of the GPL is that if Mr. Love wants to use GPL software from the commons then he can't later exlude changes he makes from that commons.
His comments later in the article show he's well aware of the issues and i suspect the journo is manipulating his words somewhat to make a better story.
GPL is about freedom and its maintenance, it leaves people free not to use it (unlike some others)
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I mean, just look at this guy, his name is Ransom Love. Did this guy change his name or something? He sounds like he is straight out of a comic book.
--
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Nahhh. For a start, as any Red Hat stockholder will tell you, the code is like 5% of the product in most cases. In many ways, IBM benefits from assured compatibility.
The real reason that GPL is a bad idea for companies is that most companies have a whole load of code (internal tools, etc, etc) which their competitors wouldn't bother looking at if you sent it round Federal Express, plus a small bit of code which absolutely has to remain proprietary. If the 95% of grunge code is GPL, then Murphy's Law guarantees that someday, somebody, no matter what processes you have in place, is going to copy 'n'paste code in such a way as to make something which ought to be part of the 5% of absolutely proprietary "franchise" code, into a derivative work of a piece of GPL software.
And that's when the stockholders get antsy.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Ransom Love is a PHB and not a techie - he doesn't deserve our respect. What have Caledra ever done to contribute to Linux anyway? Do they actually employ any linux people?
The distros that matter at the moment are Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE and Debian. Everything Redhat and Mandrake relaase is GPL, same for Debian.
Caledra used to be the "easy to use" linux distro. Now that's Mandrake. Then they had the e-desktop or some other such nonsense where they stuck a huge propriatory GUI on top of Linux.
They seem to be targetting PHB's and presenting the worst side of Linux, and now they are lending some credit to Microsoft's idiotic ramblings
Curl up and die Caledra - the Linux community don't need you.
------
C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
Let's break the logic out some.
Original poster said that Caldera was able to capitalize on the GNU programs because of the GPL.
The GPL is a free, open source license
The BSD License (and other similiar ones) are free, open source licenses.
Why would the following be incorrect:
Caldera is able to capitalize on programs because of the BSD license.
? Would have if it wasn't for the fact that it didn't?
Didn't because GNU was GPL, not BSD. However, this was not (IMHO) due to something inherent in exclusively the GPL.
So GPL is the only free open source license out there?
It seems a BSD style license would've had the exact same effect.
in response to MOBE2001
if this is the case, why does it matter to you when a big company uses a piece of GPL'd code in their closed source products, without releasing their changes?
maybe because you believe your above post, but only in the favor of the OSS community.
remember....
Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files
this includes corporations. If what you say is true, you shold have no trouble at all when a company useses GPL'd code in a commercial project.
My advice to Caldera is to stop being a cry baby and consider becoming a non-profit organization.
I give the same advice to the OSS community, stop being a cry-baby, your code will be used and abused by everyone, and there's nothing you can do.
this is not a troll, im just stating my opinion
He said uSoft was attacking the open source movement at its weakest point, the GPL. He's dead right; if you're going to attack the movement and you're willing to tell any lie, then the GPL is exactly the right place to attack.
From a business standpoint, the GPL and the Stallmanesque rhetoric of the free software movement are strange, and creepy, and frightening. The GPL is hard to understand, and it sounds vaguely communistic, and binds you with restrictions, and it's a rare suit that likes that sort of thing. So it's ripe for uSoft to spread FUD about it. Ransom's not saying anything about how good it is for the community for for developing projects (actually he said it was excellent for them). All he's saying is that from a marketing standpoint, it's a weak point that uSoft can exploit.
Then he goes on to say that Caldera's willing to consider releasing things as open source but use some other license than the GPL. He didn't commit to anything, but he's willing to do whatever turns out to be pragmatically best for business. Since my paycheck depends on his success at that, quite frankly I'm delighted by his priorities.
Chill out. He's a good guy.
I admire the people who work hard and give the source to the people -- with only one request - "Let The Source Remain Open" -- and if the source is improved upon -- continue to share the wealth.
What Caldera is (trying) to do is akin to if I sent a pantry of food to one of those skinny kids on the TV commercials (lets call him "boogleeboo")...and then ole' Boogleboo decided to open up a storefront and peddle the rice for cash rather than to put some meat on his skinny ass bones -- and then the next month I see Boogleboo on a new TV commercial lookin' even skinnier -- however with a ledger and calculator strapped on, and dollar signs in his eyes.
This whole "How to make money with Linux 101" thing is really starting to drag...I prefer the days when we did not have the money sharks in the water...and success and failure was based on quality rather than sales and stock price.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Software costs ridiculous amounts of money to make...
No, programmers charge ridiculous amounts of money for their time. A lot of good Free/Open Source programs were written at no cost by programmers in their spare time.
The incompatibility between business and the GPL only arises when you try to market a generic product. The notion of general purpose software is fairly recent. I'll admit it was a stroke of genius to switch from selling the exact right thing to 1000 people/corps to selling something "good enough" to a million of them. Trying to go into that particular market, though, armed only with the GPL is the problem, since the GPL seeks to eliminate that market.
love is clearly not acting in his own best interests. the gpl is the only license that prevents microshaft from executing their deadly "embrace and extend" incompatibilities. sure, the gpl also prevents caldera from doing the same. but, what is the bigger threat to caldera's survival? not being able to lock its customers in, or microsoft locking caldera's customers out? indeed, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. caldera's enemy is microshaft. microshaft's enemy is gpl.
"Free? That word doesn't work."
... we can all win. We need to see the Open Source marketplace change. We want to bridge the gap between the Open Source community and the needs of the commercial marketplace. That commercial marketplace is the future. We want to be the bridge to that future."
/. in months - who the fuck does this joker think he is? What he is saying is "the GPL community needs to come back to reality and help us start zipping this stuff up into brand packages and selling it. Capitalism is the only important thing. Capitalist pursuit of profit is all that matters. You are fooling yourselves if you think you can resist our 'reality' - listen to us, were Good Wise People Here To Help(TM). Now that you have built something valuable, it is your duty as a Good Cog to give it to us so we can tune it to our profit engines." (aside to his friends: "Isnt it cute the way these people go on about freedom and altruism hahahahhahhhah"
Wow what a fucking raving capitalist whore. I happen do disagree. I believe humanity's ability to do good is far greater than its desire for profit. No one likes a liar - especially not a self-interested type.
"Some are still caught up in Religion, but we're all a little older and wiser." Read: "...we're all a little more cynical and short-sighted"
"Is that really a successful business model?" NO! NOT EVERYTHING IS A FUCKING BUSINESS! GNU/Linux's *sole* purpose is *NOT* to be a tool of profit for capitalist whores like Mr.Love.
"has to be more than a kid's sandbox, where there's no timelines, no responsibility.GNU/Linux and GPL developers dont *HAVE* to do anything at all for you Mr. Love. Why do you think everyone's goals are to make money for Caldera?
"As a commercial vendor" thats your fault - not ours, maybe if you grew up and became a little less self-centred and myopic you may adjust your priorities to more reasonable and worthwhile pursuits.
"that resonates with the commercial market. I know we'll get arrows shot at us from the GPL community, but If we have a success developing a platform for the high volume hardware market we are after, the OEMs, and ISVs
Pure bullocks - what planet is this guy from? This guy enrages me more than anything ive read here on
Friends; stick to the GPL, don't use anything else for your projects (please) - People like Mr.Love see GNU/Linux as something to steal for themselves, don't let them divide you, don't let them scare you. Just keep coding and 'keep your eyes on the prize'.
"Microsoft is attacking open source at its weakest point: the GPL," said Love in an interview this week with Ziff Davis.
questioning whether companies can build valid, supportable business models around the Free Software Foundation's GPL.
Maybe - Maybe not - why is the responsibility of the GNU/Linux (GPL) coders to build a foundation for your businesses? Build your selfish capitalist businesses yourselves - Mr.Love - are you going to invite us all over to eat at your $10,000 dinner parties because we *HELP YOU*? I fucking doubt it. If altruism and freedom end up DESTROYING your businesses is it because giving something away for free is wrong? No - its because you decided to stand in the way of our honest gift with your greed.
Caldera is "seriously looking at and considering different licensing models," he said. Caldera is considering BSD and "other licensing models" that "would be truly open source but still allow folks to influence the (development) process,"
Note 'influence' and not "participate as autonomous equal to the inhouse developers"
but the original BSD license, because of an advertising clause, is not. I could very well be wrong - but im thinking that the BSD license is not GPL compatible because you can take BSD code, modify it, and distribute binaries (sans source) of your new 'modified program'. Could someone confirm/clarify for me...?
Note to self: Caldera is *not* someone who 'gets it'. I half expected Love to say "Why don't you all be good slaves and change your purposes to make me and my shareholders rich M'Kay... yeaahh Thanks"
brother - best regards, remember: An enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Software costs ridiculous amounts of money to make..so much that traditional software companies not only charge for the software
Id bet M$ spends more on marketing than it does on coders.
BigPharm spends twice as much on advertising as it does drug research.
Capitalism has terrible efficiency problems too! Waste on senseless advertising and brand building mindcontrol bullshit, lawyers of all stripes, creative accountants, sales teams, kickbacks/payoffs/lobbyists etc etc etc who needs this crap? I only want a OS - why does all this other mess have to hobble along? When you talk about the capitalist economics of the software business you have to stop and realize that what you are *NOT* paying for is the time of a programmer - its everything else... need proof? See GNU/Linux which has been built in people's spare time! What does this tell you about the economics of the software industry? it says unnecessary spending, and ridiculous profits
What capital is required to manufacture software? Cheap computers ($2000). Time. Communication. Where does the M$ monolith fit into that?
What we see here is the failed (broken) capitalist economics of the "Information Economy" - the same problem the RIAA is having you see M$ having. When will M$ buy there own version of the DMCA - "to protect the vital software industry from these dirty commies - how dare them give something away for free that we've conned people into building our billion dollar business on... Help Help HELP!"
Love admits that he does "have a problem with those members of the Linux community that are more Religionist, than Pragmatist." Love puts himself squarely in the Pragmatist camp.
Translation: Love admits that he does "have a problem with those members of the Linux community that are not Capitalists, than socialist." Love puts himself squarely in the Pragmatist camp.
While I admit that I *do* understand not everyone involved in GNU/Linux writing GPL code are 'like me'. One of my main images of GNU/Linux is a shared, libre, gratis alternative 'owned' by The People, where engineering decisions and technology choices are made the right way - by the DEVELOPERS unfettered by the BS that is involved in the Capitalist desire to build a product and market a fantasy brand. I do see GNU/Linux as an opportunity to bring technology the worlds poor, to help bootstrap their young IT industries in an equal and full manner. I do see GNU/Linux as part of a bigger worldwide movement to reduce the power capitalism has taken in the lives of people.
Mr.Love - The GPL's purpose is to provide Freedom - that also means Freedom from Technology Companies who bully the public and dictate technology options. I am an atheist, and Linux is *NOT* my Religion; I too am a pragmatist. I see GNU/Linux as a libre/gratis gift to The People - one that cannot be exploited by people such as yourself.
Not all things are for profit. Pursuing Profit with regards to all things is not justified. Not all things should be involved in the economy.
Finally someone realizes that despite all the propaganda, if you're in business, if you're MAKING MONEY, or want to, you need an unrestricted license, or at least one less restrictive than the GPL.
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All that GNU software wouldn't have been free for Caldera to capitalize if it HADN'T been for the GPL. This guy is clearly off his rocker.
This guy is not saying anything about the software they are capitalizing on... Just that he's not sure if they can make money developing their own code and distributing it under the GPL. He'll be more than happy to use everyone else's GPL'ed code though.
-ictatha
And yes, the Caldera icon does look like a blue mickey mouse on a balloon. Another conspiracy?
"... the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy" - Janov Pelorat
Nice title. Very persuasive. Doesn't NBC own that catch-phrase?
Now, regarding your post. It's true there may still be some freeware out there if not for the GPL. But the GPL is a truly revolutionary document because it protects the rights of all those who come after you. Pretty much every other license compromises with proprietary concerns, but there is no room for compromise here. Hoarding ideas is wrong, and the GPL separates the men from the boys.
The GPL may not be the best license for commerce, where "commerce" is defined as the wealth of corporations rather than the total value that exists in society. But every time someone hoards an idea by making it proprietary, they take an idea away from society by either charging for it or even refusing to let it be used (this is called "blocking" with patents). So there's an important reason why people go apeshit when companies try to dilute the GPL- the GPL, in addition to being a strong license to protect the accumulated knowledge of the public against the hoarding tendencies of corporations who own IP, encourages people to take a strong stance on sharing and is thus as much an inspiration as a shield. So you can say that without the GPL we'd have just as much free software today, but I think you miss a big part of the motivations for writing free software when you suggest that.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
All that GNU software wouldn't have been free for Caldera to capitalize if it HADN'T been for the GPL. This guy is clearly off his rocker.
Bryguy
Does anyone else think the Caldera icon looks like a blue mickey mouse on a balloon?
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Thats a bit of a strange arguement... if you attacked the assertion that GPL is free software Id go along with it, but only the GPL insures source in all its incarnations will stay open. When I think about open source I think about being able to see the source, not use it whichever way I like including closing it off and selling it.
Why a buesiness would hire coders to produce any software under licenses which allow free redistribution is beyond me.
But as we all know *sometimes* - not always - food that is prepared at home or together with friends is better tasting, better for you, cheaper, and more fun.
The problem with Microsoft is that it is a bit like one big restaurant and it is simply too large for anyone's good (even for Microsoft). It's a company that thinks it can't survive with "only" 60% of the market (instead of it's current 90%) and that is the heart of the problem. both Microsoft and Ransom Love should get used to the ideas of open source **including the GPL**. The GPL and GCC are a fundamental part of the computer industry (remember not all compilers are distributed let alone distributed with source) and they aren't going to go away.
I don't know what Microsoft thinks they are going to accomplish with public outbursts against open source and the GPL (get it banned? prevent customers from adopting software that uses it? convince developpers to stop writing GPL code for the love of God and country??) but Ransom Love is just being silly calling the GPL a "weak point".
At least in the restaurant industry it is recognized that cooking at home is a fundamental freedom. Sometimes people who cook at home get ideas and create cooking companies catering to others - or even to restaurants. Sometimes they go to work in a restaurant. Sometimes they even start their own restaurants and compete. But that's OK, cooking at home is still a good thing.
The reason stated in the article and by Mr Love is that the problem with GPL is that it puts intellectual property in trouble... well thats the idea!! production of software(or other things) does not require property at all. but property requires production. SO: 'owners' dont work, they profit! lets get rid of them. bussines can kiss our collective ass!!
I disagree with Ransom Love's idea that the GPL doesn't make business sense. For the last year I have been working fulltime coding software for my company that is publicly released under the GPL. My company only agreed to release our software as Open Source because of the GPL. It allows us to assure that oue work isn't going to be just zapped up by our competitors and sold by them. That would kill us off very quickly. Instead, we know that our competitors have to either distribute our software (under the GPL) to their customers or write their own. Either way we haven't lost. If they use our code it strengthens us becuase people come to know of our company. In fact, releasing your code under the GPL is probably the best way to get noticed and advertised. You don't have to be a big company, if your source is good, people will start hearing about your work.
On the other hand to release code under liscenses like the BSD liscense doesn't make any business sense. Our competitors will pluck out the good parts of our code, repackage it and sell it for money. We end up like a charity, donating our software to the big companies that could have afforded to do it themselves anyway. I don't think any company can continue to release their code under a BSD style license becuase it leaves them with nothing to protect themselves.The GPL is the perfect license because it protects your property and protects the freedom of your source code. This is what Microsoft hate and fear the most. Microsoft love BSD code because it helps them rather than hinders them.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
You're either a troll or an idiot. Approximately 95% of software developed is for in-house use only. A very small fraction is shrink-wrapped and sold to people. Software will never become totally free since companies will always protect their in-house software (or at least no one else except their competitors would even care about it anyway). So as long as you're not working for Microsoft, you're in no danger of being unemployed. So DO you work for MS?
I find it curious and rather laughable that a number of Slashdot readers claim not to have heard of Caldera, or make comments to the effect that Caldera ought to further promote their distro and gain increased visibility. First, Caldera is oriented entirely towards the business user and server markets, thus its low "desktop user" name recognition.
Second, Caldera is that company that bought SCO-UNIX (remember them?) It has been committed to integrating features found in the commercial UnixWare product into mainstream Linux, and has been steadily developing Volution, a complete Linux network management infrastructure.
Caldera's target audience is the corporate space, which is not necessarily ideologically enamoured of Open Source, preferring to keep intellectual property rights and profit from them. Without a licensing scheme that gives these companies the confidence to venture into mainstream Linux acceptance, they never may. Caldera should be observed with keen interest, not scorn, for having the courage to say what many have been thinking for a while, and see what solutions thy come up with.
Um, that was Kondara, and they actually had some innovations of their own (complete system internationalization and language switching without reboot, and not just KDE) but not enough to justify their existence.
But for all the Caldera haters: Volution and OpenSLP have the potential to change corporate perception of Linux, and the way infrastructure is set up.
The fact of the matter is that the GPL has almost certainly been an asset to Linux. If this weren't the case then one of the BSDs would be top dog in the Free *nix world. The fact of the matter is that software consumers love the GPL.
actually, it can be argued that one of the bsds is *nix top dog, its name is darwin. with apple installing os x as the default os on all its machines this summer, bsd will sell in quantities linux can not hope to match. the fact of the matter is that consumers love good software, and the bsd license lets apple improve and innovate and still pay its programmers
unfortunately companies publishing under the gpl have been unable to make a profit. that doesnt say good things about them continuing to advance the software. why shouldnt developers make money for their effort?
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
It is called X because it was the sequel to a system called W.
It is not the same system as the mother-of-all-GUIs developed at Xerox PARC, nor was it named after it.
where there's fish, there's cats
Is it just me, or does that logo resemble half of Mickey Eisner's head looking into the sunset? Forgive my offtopicalitude.
I like toast!
I'll agree with you, freedom is great. But it sounds like you think code should be more free than people. The GPL does great things to insure the freedom of code, but it forces anyone who wants to use that code for any reason, however benevolent, to release all other code touching it with a compatible license. That not only restricts the options available to the programmer considering using it, but may render the code totally unusable, even for a free project, if the licensing is incompatible. Since a good bit of the benefit of free software is code reuse, the GPL can get rather counterproductive.
;)
As for the fruit growing thing, it is wildly impractical. I'd have to spend zillions of hours of overtime each week in the fields picking fruit at minimum wage to make a decent living. How, pray tell, would I then have the time or energy to write programs? What would be my motivation, aside from my own pleasure, for doing so? Plus there is the fun little problem of being handicapped. I can't do a manual labor job. The only way I can make a living is with my brains. Unless your rosy future has me living on Welfare and writing free software?!?
BTW, making millions of copies of Windows 2000 tends to get people sued by Microsoft if they can catch you. Gee, I guess we do have that good ole "Orwellian form of government", at least in the US. And rising up and kicking the rear end of the government can land one in jail, even in a free country, if one breaks any laws doing it. It's best to free one's own code, not the code of others without their permission.
Mothra 1961-2001: Her heart can reach!
Caldera always has been in to this IP thing. Here is a quote from an old Fool.com article (August 14, 2000 )
From the article:
( I believe they also rejected Apple's Darwin licence recently)
Just who is the FSF to dictate the importance of a licence by its 'GPL' compatibility?
A licence is a license; don't like? Don't use it! - simple, isn't it?
I mean, I'm not gonna go out and not use something that doesn't have a 'GPL-compatible' license just because the FSF have some big presence and just say so.
I'll decide what I want to use, and if the license's term don't bode well with me, then I'll look for something else.
[rant mode off]
Reports indicate that the phrase "All you atom are belong to us" was heard just before the blinding flash occured...
AC comments get piped to
OK. Redhat does not make their money selling Linux-- they sell Linux to make their other products more profitable: consulting and support (the former is more important than the second).
If you are a business, you want to know that you can call someone at 3am when your server decides to kernel panick randomly so you buy an expensive contract from RedHat.
More importantly, you need some help making some modifications to your existing installation (either implimentation changes or actual software changes) and so you buy help from Red Hat. Their annual revenue is now about $100 Million.
Not all Linux users are both competent network architects and programmers... That is where the money is to be made. Note: People make similar money with NT, so this is not unusual in this industry except that these consultants in the case of Linux comapnies is that the consulting company distributes the software to ensure consistancy in their ability to provide quality consulting.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
GPL is bad if your business is based solely off a GPL'd product. Finally, economic sense enters the world of .com's...
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A business that doesnt exist can't deliver products to the consumer. Which is worse..paying money or just having something simply not exist? The company has to make money. They have workers to pay. This world is not a free one.
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Software costs ridiculous amounts of money to make..so much that traditional software companies not only charge for the software, they charge for the support too and all the things that your GPL company would supposedly make its money from.
This isnt from greed, it's from the sheer cost of making software. A company that doesnt charge for its software is always going to be at a disadvantaged compared to those who DO charge for it. And in the end, that kind of company can only grow so much and be only so successful.
You cannot make reasonable revenue from selling mere product complements (especially if most of those complements can be had for free also...ie, support from mailing lists and the like is often enough for most people).
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Love said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense.
Once again Love has betrayed me....
Wait...
Love's point of view on GPL isn't surprising. In fact. He has expressed his viewpoint on Linux community as a whole, that "proprietary software isn't all bad", in an slashdot article.
Which is very consistant with his speech last year:
"Will we give everything back to the GPL? No, not everything we do," Love said. "There will be times when we hold on, we may take ownership of some products, but we will always provide open access to the source code."
Would GPL software development end if all the big corportations decided not to respect it? Of course all the members of the open source community would fight them tooth and nail, but that is not the point.
The essence of the open source movement is that the motivation comes not from money, but from the recognition of achievement, and sometimes not even anything more than ones own personal recognition, not the recognition of others.
In its purest sense sharing your work in an opens source fashion is like giving money to the homeless person you see on the street, you and he are the only people who know about the transaction. However this hypothetical person uses the money (or software) is completely beyond your control. If they go out and do the wrong thing, buy booze, or sell it without giving away the source code. The faith to take that chance and give away something that is valuable to you without strings attached is the real force that powers open source. As long as people are willing to make that leap with their work, and with the work of others that they have improved upon open source will never die.
And the Microsofts of the world days are numbered. And they Know it.
I think their fear of the GPL is more contamination. In most things, they are ahead of the curve, but they are probably scared that when they are playing catch up, or when they are reimplementing existing technologies, that they will accidentally borrow something GPL'ed, thus causing legal problems of unknown dimensions.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
The purpose of the GPL is not the promotion of competitive businesses but to encourage code reuse and cooperation among our fellow humans. I've said this before, the only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property. Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures, music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it. The GPL encourages people to go back to trading in tangibles goods and share the intangible with their brothers and sisters. Capitalism sets people against one another. Eventually we will become worst than beasts, constantly at each other's throats. The GPL is trying to reverse this animalistic trend.
People yearn to be free. Anytime somebody tries to control other people's liberty, they get burned. The French have a saying for this, "Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop" which, roughly translated means "Chase away nature, she'll charge back gallopping." That is what the GPL is all about, FREEDOM. And freedom is part of human nature.
So if you want to do business, go sell bananas or oranges or something of that nature because your ideas are no longer your ideas once you let them out. Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files unless Big Brother enacts an Orwellian form of government. And if that happens, we'll all rise up and kick his arse.
When Caldera releases their for-profit code, people around the world will download it for free and pass it around and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it. They'll copy it for the same reason that they make millions of copies of MS Windows 2000 and use it for free. My advice to Caldera is to stop being a cry baby and consider becoming a non-profit organization.
Check out some more good 'uns on this page. oh, and no of course i don't then go ahead and install AOL. duh, i use them for coasters like everyone else...
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Caldera has always understood the rules as well or better than anybody else, and has played a fair game with the community. Why don't you all hold off on the flames until they release something under a different license model, and then make a judgement as to whether their intentions are honorable or not.
Y'all bemoan the fact, daily it seems, that OSS companies keep going broke, but when somebody tries to find a way to make an honest buck, you crucify them. Lighten up. Caldera will do the right thing based on their past performance.
How well does Trolltech's buisness model work (the Qt guys)? They release their code under the GPL for free -OR- a buisness can buy a commercial license from them (for a fee). Since they own all of the code they can (legally) get away with doing this (they don't incorporate any outside GPL code into their library, AFAIK). This seems like a great way to use the GPL and have a viable business at the same time. The thing to watch out for, of course, would be accepting GPL'd fixes or whatnot from the community...
And what are you, the missing link? One has to wonder how long a go your 14 year old older brother started letting you play on his BSD box, sorry dude X-Windows (The Xerox Windowing System) is long since history and the Mach kernel sucks.
You are an idiot.
Yep, a sentient comment. I never muched like caldera's super corporate image much (strokes 2 inch long goatie). Only bad can come of this, I think it's time for a planet wide boycott.
Nick Petreley, open-source commentator, founding editor of LinuxWorld.com, and all-'round great guy, was recently laid off by Caldera. Coincidence???
Of course the GPL doesn't make any sense from a "business" perspective. Who would invest time and money creating a product that anyone else can redistribute at no cost?
But that's not the point.
What the GPL and free software enables is a strong service orientation. And I don't mean BS enterprises like printing manuals or tech support. Let's say I have a business selling POS terminals (or some other custom application). If there is a free version my overhead (and my customer's) are reduced from the get go. I don't spend capital investing in some third party software; I focus on the services and value that I add through configuration/integration/enhancement that my customer needs. The software is open; I can change it to do whatever it needs to be. My customer has complete control. I can redistribute my changes and enhancements to other customers, if I want to. So could my customer, for that matter. Chances are they won't, since they're not a software consulting shop. Ultimately it my expertise that I'm selling and free software is enabling. Exactly the reason I went into business for in the first place.
Microsoft is exclusively focused on selling software as product and an end unto itself, rather than focusing on the higher level services that it enables. This is why they hate free software.
Stallman says add to this code and you are one of us. Gates says use this code and you belong to us.
--
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Personally it's allways puzzled me how we can have all these companies selling what is basically a free product.
I can see how they can sell services, manuals and so forth, but the service market for Linux isn't as lucrative as for other software sectirs for the simple reason that most Linux users know what their doing.
With bradband becoming more prevelant, the distributors are really going to have tp try hard to make a buck on the distros themselves.
I personally think it's sad to see people saying "Oh, they're not going to live & die by the GPL? Well, screw them! Let Caldera crash & burn!"
Actually, I think they'd do quite well. They make a few pretty cool products, Volution being one of them. Excellent tool for managing multiple servers. I like the GPL, but really.. it's hard to get something back from it, namely what you need to continue your business. Businesses need to make money to survive. I've seen too many rip-offs of GPL software springing up left & right. "Kondama" (something like that) was jumping on the bandwagon, putting out what looked exactly like a $99 box to Comanche (the Apache conf GUI) complete with their logo and goofy penguin cartoon with "LINUX RULES!!" tattooed on its arm.
If Caldera altering their products to a new license would prevent crap like *that* from coming out in the future, I'm all for it. Mr. Love *does* have a point, whether one likes to admit it or not. With the number of Linux companies folding these days, whatever they can do to stay afloat might not be a bad thing. Think about it, would you rather see Linux remain a viable solution or would you rather have Microsoft be correct when they say "Look, we're still here, look at these Linux companies failing.. stick with Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, we're a STABLE company...".. or what? Gotta be realistic here, folks..
He may think that the GPL is ineffective but as long as he wants to develope something better to further the open source effort I'm all for it. Getting stuck on one way of combating big corporations is stupid, we have to constantly evolve to combat tyranny where ever it pops up.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
The X Window system is as you describe it.
I think the previous commenter was parodying the mis-use of 'X Windows', taking it literally to be something else from Xerox. Just to detract from the subject being discussed. Not very responsible, and off-topic, but perhaps that's part of his dodge of the issue.
To try to get the discussion back on track:
The point is, tons of Free Software isn't released under the GPL. If Linux hadn't happened along, the BSD system would have filled it's role, without the GPL. The past decade has seen tons of hardware made available to hackers. The availability of cheap computing equipment with memory management hardware is the cause for the growth of the Freenix movement, not Linux itself, nor the GPL. BSD could have filled the same shoes, and indeed it does where it's used. The GPL didn't 'cause' anything, nor was it the spark of a 'revolutionary Free Software Movement.'
If anything, Microsoft forcing the obsolescence of billions of dollars worth of equipment (boxes that no longer run the latest, greatest bloatware from Microsoft) has given geeks everywhere cheap/free gear to play with. It could even be postulated that Microsoft-driven forced obsolescence has been a greater spur for freenix development than the GPL.
It's definitely a reach to credit the 'Freenix revolution' to the GPL, which some would say is a side factor.
Well, obviously when you define a term (Free Software) to be a quasi trademark you can define it to mean whatever you want.
I maintain that the connectivity revolution that the Internet represented, along with the proliferation of cheap hardware, made it inevitable that a family of Freenixes would emege, with or without the GNU organisation out there claiming credit.
Ransom Love has the best name in Linux.
I wouldn't dismiss Caldera's philosophy based on its "outsider" position in the community -- often it is the outsiders that have the clearest viewpoints.
To say that Linux is silencing others because of its success is probably exaggerating things a bit, but on the other hand it's partially true. Linux has a public relations momentum that most other alternatives don't. It's Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke. I'm sure that BeOS and others wish they had even a part of what the Linux movement now takes for granted.
Is proprietary software all that bad? I would say no, as long as it is in moderation. People should have the right to make proprietary software if they so desire, as long as they realize the benefits they are missing out on. The strength of the Linux movement is that it is primarily open source and free-as-in-speech. Nevertheless, every movement needs some variety.
In a sense, the GPL is a strict and binding way to make things free and public. Does that sound contradictory at all? I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just that I see his point.
Is it possible that the demand for open source code is to strong at times? Personally, I don't think so. What makes Linux wonderful is that if you want to change something, you just dig in and do it. I disagree with Love on this particular point.
Perhaps the GPL needs a little modification. From what I understand the arguement is that if you were to change software in house (either Govt of business) you have to publish those changes and that work is then freely available and that this will be unacceptable to most organizations. So, why not allow modifications with say a 5 year closed code option providing that it is for "in house use only" - any commercializtion of the code would require publishing. That way the code will eventually be open and free but still allows an organization to develop programs based on GPL'ed code and still the "paid for" component for a reasonable period of time.