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

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