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PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD
jones_supa writes "This discovery comes nicely alongside the celebration of FreeBSD's 20th birthday, for all the UNIX nerds. The operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86-64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD. BSDs in general currently lack manufacturer supported full-feature AMD graphics driver, which leads to the conclusion that Sony and AMD have likely co-developed a discrete driver for the PS4. Some pictures of the development kit boot loader (GRUB) have been published too."
BSD license, I'm not sure you understand it.
The license war he's talking about would proceed approximately as follows:
GPL: had BSD been licensed under the GPL (I know, word salad), then Sony would have been forced to release the modifications to the kernel, and we would be able to better mod the PS4/overall cost to society would be lower since all the improvements would be available to everyone
BSD: had BSD been licensed under the GPL, Sony would not have used the kernel, they would never upstream any changes, and the overall cost to society would be greater since they would have been forced to develop their own, in-house kernel.
I'm trying to be neutral here, but I'm probably just starting the flamewar. You probably can tell what my bias is, but whatever.
Indeed. The best is whatever works for you.
BSD: Good if you want high availability/adoption and don't care if derived projects are OSS.
Linux: Good if you want high availability but no closed-source spinoffs.
If it wasn't for the fact that OpenSSH is BSD licensed, we'd still have TELNET all over the place. I benefit from that.
The same is true for every other standard internet service. TCP/IP, HTTPD, SMTP, DNS, DHCP, FTP, LDAP, NTP, etc. Just try to name one service that has become a defacto standard, which only had a GPL-licensed reference implementation... They don't exist.
I benefit from that, you benefit from that. And it's solely the domain of BSD/Apache-licensed software. NOT GPL'd software.
The right to get a tarball is of almost no practical value. Look at things like Xen, Android, Webkit, etc. A publicly available blob of code helps no one. It can't get integrated upstream without those companies going far above and beyond what the GPL requires. And if they go above and beyond what the GPL requires, there's no reason to believe they won't go far above and beyond what the BSD license requires.
It's in the companies' self-interest to release their code changes under the same license for upstream integration. And even if they chose not to, there's no HARM to the public or the contributors, as the upstream source is still available under the same license as always.
And with the BSD license, companies have the option to contribute in other ways if they can't release source code. Money to the upstream project is almost always more beneficial than a blob of changes. One example, while Apple may have locked-up their Darwin OS under a different license, they've still contributed plenty back to BSD. LLVM comes to mind, but there are many others as well.
It's not FREEDOM to compel others to give their hard work to you, for free. And others choosing not to do so, does NOT imping upon your own FREEDOM. You had the same amount of freedom before and after they used some BSD licensed code in their own project. The GPL may just as well have a clause saying you must donate X dollars to the FSF if you want to use the software. You seem to think it's "FREEDOM" when penalizing anyone who uses GPL software, so that should be just as good...
And you should be very careful with that line of thinking... The GPLv3 has been a flaming pile of failure, because it forced too many demands upon those who wished to use licensed code. It caused a surge of BSD development, most notably projects like LLVM which are on-course to replace GCC, all despite not having a license that forces people to support the project.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant