Ex-Novell CEO praises FreeBSD

Bob Frankenberg was CEO of Novell in the early nineties, when Novell were marketing DR-DOS as a replacement for MS-DOS (DR-DOS is now the subject of a law suit between Caldera and Microsoft). In part of this CBS interview he explains why his new company, Encanto, is not using Microsoft software, and why they chose FreeBSD. Read on for a few notes.

There are a number of interesting things to take from this article. It's unsurprising that an ex-Novell CEO does not want to use MS software after the way Novell were treated by them, it is mildly surprising that he hasn't chosen a Novell, or other 'industry standard' solution.

Encanto's choice of FreeBSD over Linux is also interesting. Naturally, we all know that FreeBSD is the best choice (heh heh heh :-)), but Linux (or Solaris) would be the anti-MS knee jerk choice. Using FreeBSD suggests that they've actually investigated the different OS choices open to them, and chosen one on merit -- or that the first SA they hired preferred FreeBSD over Linux.

As ever, the media have got the licensing issues wrong. One of the key things about the BSD license is that you don't have to contribute enhancements back to the original codebase if you don't want to -- of course, that doesn't stop many companies from doing so anyway, because it's better business sense in the long run.

Having looked at the Encanto web site, and the products they're selling, the license may very well be the key issue. They sell network appliances -- plug and play web servers, that sort of thing, and the ability to make proprietry changes to the code base to support their product (and enhance their product's value) without having to disclose those changes is probably key to their business plan.

This is quite similar to the approach taken by Whistle and their Interjet devices. Whistle have been the classic example of a company which has contributed code back, even though the license doesn't force them to -- typically 6 to 12 months after they've deployed it in their product, and reaped the commercial benefit. This lets them recoup their development costs plus profit, and lets the rest of the community benefit from (and extend and support) the code later on.

Finally, CBS's phrase, "so-called open-source software" should get them a stiff letter from ESR...