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DTrace Becomes Usable on FreeBSD
daria42 writes "A project to port Sun Microsystems' Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) tool to FreeBSD appears to have achieved some initial success. DTrace was open sourced last year and is one of the coolest features in Solaris 10."
From a strategy point of view it just made BSD's that much more competitive with Solaris and Sun offers.
Now, last time I checked, Sun regards Redhat as one of its main competitors for 'enterprise unix' systems. So, since you are saying is that due to dtrace, FreeBSD became more competitive with Solaris, doesn't that mean it became that much more competitive with at least Redhat Linux?
With the GPL you at least get some improvemnts back if your contribution is of value and nobody can close its acess.
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? Ah, I see, you were just looking for a reason to do some 'GPL advocacy'.. Let me make some small suggestion: Advocacy like this is just annoying the hell out of people, and makes you look like a fanatic idiot.
Not to mention that the fud you are spreading is just that, fud. Nobody can close access to existing BSD licenced code EVER, got that? (and yes, people can derive from a BSD licenced work, and keep their source changes private while distributing the binaries. If people want to do that with GPLed code, they cannot distribute, or have to obtain an alternative licence from the authors, see the Trolltech business model)
As a developer, if you value your work, the GPL is the better license under which to release code, as it means no-one can take your work, close the source, and sell it as their own.
Now, the modern BSD licence only contains 2 clauses, is really easy to read, and yet you fail to understand it. You think anyone should take your advice?
You can NOT take a BSD licenced work and claim it as your own, that is basicly the one and only thing that licence prevents you from doing. All you can do which you cannot do with the GPL is keep changes to the source private while distributing the binary result. You may believe that is bad, and you are entitled to your own beliefs there. I happen to believe otherwise, and with me, there seem thousands of people who believe otherwise, but again, that is a matter of opinion, and not a matter of fact.
It means every change is visible to you,
No, it does not. It only guarantees that if you get back a binary of some derived program, that you also have a right on getting the source with the changes. You have no right to see anyones changes if they decide to not distribute the result but use it for their own internal work for example.
and that you are free to incorporate the changes other people have made to your product back into it, or into other projects you are working on.
Not if you are for example called Trolltech (qt), Sun (OpenOffice) or anyone else who deals with dual licencing, but generally that is the idea of the GPL indeed. It is a good argument for it, despite it not always working out.
This encourages collaboration, and thus helps the advancement of software engineering.
The fact that all TCP/IP (ip4) implementations are mostly compatible, that most of the basic protocols used on it are compatible between vendors and such are pretty much because there is good and for any purpose usable BSD code around to implement those things, which was either used directly or used as a reference implementation to test against.
This single tiny detail makes that there is actually some choice instead of having ended up with a proprietary network owned by either aol, microsoft, ibm or some other big entity.
I leave it to your imagination what this means for software development.
I will give you one more suggestion, learn to appreciate someone elses work, esp. when that work is pretty good and they actually insist on publishing that work such that everyone can use it. If you just feel that instead of appreciating such things, you must use the occation to spread lies and fud then I call you a moron.