AOL teams up with NCI

AOL announced today it is teaming up with NCI, as software partner, to build a range of AOL set-top boxes. NCI uses FreeBSD suggesting AOL may be shipping FreeBSD based boxes. The devices will use MediaGX chips from National/Cyrix. Update: 05/12 04:07 by S : Paul Wain of NCI wrote in to tell me in an unofficial capacity that their "Corporate" Machines use a NetBSD derivative but the consumer ones use other OSes. Some of our server products use FreeBSD but not the "Consumer" ones.

Comments

A proprietary fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that one of the problems with the BSD license is that a company such as AOL can take the existing code base, modify it to their needs, and copyright the resulting fork.

It is this very possibility to prevents MS from a takeover of a GLP'ed project, (i.e. Linux).

Or am I misunderstanding the issue.

Re:A proprietary fork?

[howardjp]

This is not a problem. The license specifically allows for anyone to create a proprietary fork. This is one of the reasons I use FreeBSD and have contributed back code to it. It is also one of the reasons companies make more money from BSD than they do from Linux.

Reading the BSD lists, I have seen many say that it is not about a vision or freedom or even anti-Microsoft behaviour. It is simply about writing the best software possible and allowing anyone to use it however they want. And the license is targetted as such.

Re:A proprietary fork?

[perry]

This is not a "problem" -- this is intentional. One of the reasons I hack on NetBSD is that I want people to be able to use my code, even for proprietary projects.

In general, most companies have been remarkably good at contributing back fixes.

The folks at Digital contributed back virtually every bit of their reference port of NetBSD to their ARM32 based NC. The folks at Apple, who use NetBSD's userland and TCP/IP stack in Darwin/OS-X have contributed back virtually all the code they fixed or changed to us. A number of people from NC participate on NetBSD technical mailing lists and contribute back fixes, too.

Re:A proprietary fork?

[cjs]

understand that one of the problems with the BSD license is that a company such as AOL can take the existing code base, modify it to their needs, and copyright the resulting fork.

No, that's not an accurate statement; you are misunderstanding the issue.

In terms of copyright, AOL owns the copyright on any changes it makes, but not on the original code. This is true under both the BSD licence and the GPL. In both cases they are also free not to distribute their changes, if they want to keep them for in-house use.

The difference between the Berkeley licence and the GPL is that under the former they may distribute binary versions of their software without distributing the source, under the latter they must distribute the source as well.

In the end, this isn't as big a deal as one would think. There are very strong financial incentives to contributing changes back to the open source maintainers because it's actually quite expensive to maintain your own separate tree, especially in terms of debugging. Take a look at how far behind NetBSD OpenBSD now is, despite a couple of dozen developers working on it--they simply don't have the manpower to keep merging in the NetBSD changes, especially the larger ones.

Regardless, a project cannot be `taken over' by someone who's keeping his changes private; the original source code doesn't disappear. A project can only be `taken over' if people stop working on the free version. And the mere presence or absence of someone else using that code base for their ends is not going to do that.

I know this is an emotional issue for some people; that's why it's important to keep in mind that, while you may have problems with other people making money from you code, many BSD contributors don't have a problem with this. I'm perfectly happy to see someone take free code I've developed and make money from it; I put it out there for others to use, after all. That, to my mind, is the whole point of code being free: people can use it without the sort of restrictions that the GPL puts on you.

cjs

Recent C|Net articles on Linux and set-tops

[davie]

AOL considering Linux device, sources say

Caldera adding Linux to set-top boxes

This one mentions that there was a company in the running for the AOL contract with a Linux-based set-top, but they lost out.

No, they use NetBSD

[perry]

NCI uses FreeBSD based servers, but the network computers themselves run a derivative of NetBSD. I happen to have a Genuine DNARD (Digital Network Appliance Reference Design) network computer sitting right here, complete with NC logo painted on the front. It was built to run NetBSD. (Runs it beautifully, btw -- the boxes are fully supported by recent NetBSD releases.)

This should be obvious to people, of course. NCs are mostly not Intel based -- they tend to run on processors like ARMs and MIPS, and FreeBSD runs mostly on the i386. (They have an Alpha port but it isn't stable yet -- they certainly have no ARM or MIPS ports).

Re:Spot for Mozilla?

[cjs]

I assume MSIE won't work on BSD, right?

It should work under NetBSD/i386 as well as it works under Linux, FreeBSD, BSDI, SCO or Solaris/x86. And under NetBSD/sparc as well as it works under SunOS or Solaris. I'm not entirely convinced it `works' on any of these platforms, though. :-)

I do run Solaris and SunOS versions of Netscape Navigator quite successfully on my NetBSD/sparc system, and tons of Linux applications (including Communicator and RealAudio player) under NetBSD/i386.

It seems to me, in fact, that one of the best contributions Linux may be making is to bring forth a broadly available ABI--essentially an informal standard ABI for the Unix community. The lack of this has always been a complaint in the past.

cjs

FreeBSD settop? Cool!

[Izaak]

I've been a FreeBSD user and fan since the beginning, and I am all for this. Linux is great, but so is FreeBSD. Either one is a great choice.

Thad

Happy confluence here!

[timothy]

Slashdot is unddeniably Linux-centric (is there a charter somewhere making it so?!) but this is a thought worth pursuing ... the old "Can't we all just get along?"in regards to Linux and Free / Open / NetBSD and any other free OS.

FreeBSD, Linux, other free OS projects have far more in common with each other in comparison to most commercial OSes than they have differences amongst themselves.

I think the Linux devpt. process is neat (as a geek only in the old fashioned sense, with no likely code contributions unless my brain grows a bit), but then so is the FreeBSD model.

Set-top boxes / appliances running abstracted versions of any free OS are cool because of what they imply and the possibilities they open up.

Especially given that one implication is that MS operating systems are not the only choice. News to no one reading this, but to middle america -- still, I assert -- a personal computer is either a cute box with a Macintosh splashscreen or a more rectilinear box with the Windows splashscreen, and other operating systems are still experimental / 'out there.'

Lets hear it for differences!

Timothy