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FreeBSD 9.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 9.0 has been released. A few highlights include: A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release, The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling, and Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support."
People with entitlement complexes and inability to understand simple instructions get surprised when someone gets angry after they take code that says "You can use this as long as you make the result GPL" and use it without making the result GPL.
They could have written their own or taken someone else's code with a more permissive license like BSD, but suggesting this causes them to react like the guy who defends his use of TPB for his movie watching by declaring he has some sort of right to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, without having to pay for it.
You want it, you follow the rules to get it buddy. If you don't like the rules, nobody's forcing you to get it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
What's wrong with GPL?
It annoys the minority of businesses who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers and don't want to give anything back.
You misspelled "everything" as "anything".
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
I mean hey, launching a commercial product with most of the work already done for you, for free, is a nice racket if you can get it. But if the developers intend to allow this, they wouldn't use GPL, they would use a BSD-type license. For reasonable people, this is not a problem. Reasonable people think either "hey, this code is available for free and we have no problem complying with the license, so we can enjoy all the effort that has already been done for us and build on that", or they think "the terms of that license aren't compatible with our business model, or we're afraid of how a court may interpret them, so we can't use that code, oh well, this has not harmed us in any way so we really have no complaint".
If you can't see how the GPL dominating a market can do harm to groups of people that can't use the GPLed version but needs customisations - then you've not thought hard enough about the problem. Think about monopolies and "embrace, extend, extinguish", just performed with software given away gratis with restrictions.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
And if that's not to their liking, the only thing they miss out on is the gratis skilled labor of strangers. They are still free to write their own code under any license they want. I just don't see the problem, unless of course there is a sense of entitlement to something no one actually owes them. That's the only explanation for why anyone would experience any distress over this.
If you can't see how the GPL dominating a market can do harm to groups of people that can't use the GPLed version but needs customisations - then you've not thought hard enough about the problem. Think about monopolies and "embrace, extend, extinguish", just performed with software given away gratis with restrictions.
How does GPL "dominate" a market? By that I mean: what's stopping these hypothetical groups from hiring their own programmers to write their own software that is licensed any way they like? A patent could definitely do that, but the GNU Public License is not a patent. If I am a developer who uses the GPL, how am I "doing harm" to you by not giving you my work for free? Again, only a false belief that you are entitled to my labor would make you feel "harmed" in any way.
What non-patented feature can you name for me in a GPL'ed project that an independent commercial project could not also implement? They would have to write their own code, sure, but if you really believe that constitutes "embrace, extend, extinguish" then you don't really understand what that term means. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is not possible without closed source and/or patents.
That's too bad (for them only) some people feel offended that they can't just copy-and-paste someone else's code into their project, but nothing is stopping them from using their own original code to match every feature found in any non-patented GPL'ed project.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So what do e.g. Oracle, SAP and Google if not proprietary software? Cheese?
Of course they use Linux, because they're not ignorant and know they can run proprietary software on it without having to touch their licenses. The GPL only affects derivative works, which userland applications running on the Linux kernel aren't considered to be.
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If they want to give 90% back - which is common behavior for proprietary derivatives of BSD licensed codebases - they can't. They have to give back 100%, or stay out.
And if that's not to their liking, the only thing they miss out on is the gratis skilled labor of strangers. They are still free to write their own code under any license they want. I just don't see the problem, unless of course there is a sense of entitlement to something no one actually owes them. That's the only explanation for why anyone would experience any distress over this.
Or maybe, because the rest of us lose out on the 90% they would have given back?
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Most experts explain it as being because of the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit. Until that was decided, FreeBSD was in murky waters few were willing to go along with. And it happened at exactly the wrong time, when i386 systems were growing in popularity, and people wanted some Unix-like OS to run on it, and really wanted it for free.
Network effects kicked-in at that point. Linux got more developers because it was getting more press (and a lone student writing an OS is a better story than Berkley's largess), and it got more press because it was getting more developers, and it got more press because it got more press.
And the definitive counter-point to GPL supporters, is network services... Anyone can name a million and one network services that became defacto standards. BIND *is* DNS. Sendmail *is* SMTP. The BSD TCP/IP stack *is* the internet protocol, and it's bugs and limitations have become the standard.
The most recent example is OpenSSH. It wasn't FreSSH that gained 98% market share in a few years... Nope. And until OpenSSH, crypto was massively overdue, yet none of the alternatives caught-on... Licensing had a hell of a lot to do with that... always does.
NFS was in the same boat... Sun released NFS with an open license (not GPL'd), and it became the standard. NFSv3 was massively crufty and overdue for replacement, yet the dozens of GPL'd network file systems with modern features ever caught on... NFSv4 finally came out, with the main implementation under a free license, that finally made progress.
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