Why do people always see MS behind the scenes sowing dissension in the free Unix ranks? I will admit that MS has certainly questionable business practices but it doesn't typically openly try to do this, but rather subtly in the background (ie. make Netscape run slower on MS hosted sites, etc...)
I even got a similar response like this one to my editorial in this month's Daemon News. I swear people think Bill Gates is like the Wizard of Oz and hiding behind every curtain.
Re:In a perfect world, BSD would be the perfect...
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Feature:GPL vs BSD
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The BSD folks strive to have complete freedom and the very best code! They will never have the very best code because everyone else will have it too! This situation is probably their aim and if it is... it's working.
Damn - I'd hate it everyone had an OS or software that worked.
The point is that the BSD license allows more freedom of use because companies will not use the GPL or they won't survive since they can't sell their value-added product because the GPL would force them to give the source to it to everyone, including their competitors.
Do you honestly expect WordPerfect, Oracle, or any of the other big commercial vendors who've jumped on the Linux bandwagon (primarily for the PR) to actually release their source? Not a chance.
The BSD license gives everyone the chance to have a good fill_in_the_blank. Witness the TCP/IP stack that the Internet lives on - from BSD.
There's a vast difference between science and code and licenses. Sheesh.
Let's see, you say that alchemy was broken by the open publishing of research? Did you know that Newton, often thought of as the father of modern physics, who's laws we use to this day (assuming velocities are low and we're in a weak field of gravity) was an alchemist? Do you know how he spent the last few years of his life? Read also about how Tycho Brahe kept his observational data of the planets' motion away from Kepler while he lived in hopes that he could figure out the motion of the planets. You can go read Carl Sagan's Cosmos and find out.
If you honestly think the license argument is at all related to alchemy vs. "science" then you vastly misunderstand how scientists (including alchemists) work.
Re:Ms took BSD code! We do live in a GPL world!
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Feature:GPL vs BSD
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And the problem w/ everyone having a good TCP/IP stack (even M$ users)? People who use the BSD license want everyone to have good software, not just people who use the same OS or license.
If M$ is scared of Linux (and I don't think they really are - whether they should be is another question) and not of *BSD, it's certainly not because Linux uses the GPL. If they are scared it's because of the userbase of Linux and the hype it's been getting in the media.
Looking at growth trends, FreeBSD is essentially on the same growth curve as Linux but 2-3 years behind (attributable to the 4.4-BSD court case and the switch to the 4.4-BSD-lite code.)
So why doesn't M$ just take the existing Free, Net, and Open BSD code, merge together what they want and release it as M$ BSD or M$ Linux or whatever? They're free to do it - will they? No.
Will M$ make a M$-Linux - no, and it won't be because of the license....
Re:Emacs vs XEmacs -- NetBSD vs OpenBSD
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Feature:GPL vs BSD
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As Doug points out, Emacs and XEmacs are GPL'd (does this other guy even know who wrote Emacs? and he's in favor of the GPL... sigh). Anyway, NetBSD and OpenBSD split because of personality conflicts in the core team. Has the code forked? Um no. All of the BSDs borrow code from the others.
Why people think the BSD license forks code and the GPL is somehow immune to this? Gcc vs egcs, libc vs glibc etc are fine examples of GPL projects splitting.
As I noted this is an older post as the mail archives haven't been updated on www.freebsd.org yet (they do it weekly). Charles said in another post that the FreeBSD machines were more stable under the load than Linux so he used FreeBSD. Unfortunately I didn't save that post so I can't directly quote it until they update the list archives.
I don't recall him saying that it was faster under FreeBSD although there is some evidence that some software does run faster under emulation than natively on Linux.
At least FreeBSD (I don't have lots of experience with Net or Open) has ports for all of the above. I've tried WordPerfect under FreeBSD's Linux emulation and it works fine - I use LaTeX for most everything so I haven't used it much though. KDE, Gnome and over 2100 other ports are available for install by simply typing "make install" in the port directory. I find it much easier than using RPMs in my experience.
According to Charles Henrich who works for Manex he chose FreeBSD over Linux because he prefers it and found it more stable. I was trying to find his post describing this but the mailing list archive on www.freebsd.org hasn't been updated recently enough. Ooops - I found it, at least one of them. Here's a quote:
Basically we used a collection of 32 Dual Proc P-II/450 systems w/ 1GB of memory and 9GB Ultra2/LVD drives (Dell Precision 410's), as well as 40 MIPS R10k processors (the P-II's in general outperformed the fastest R10k). We used Pixar's Renderman under Linux emulation (yeech, maybe next time I can get them to give me a native FreeBSD port) on the FreeBSD systems. With the exception of some wackyness caused when our renders started to exceed 1GB of memory (FreeBSD got real grumpy then) things were pretty darn smooth. Easily as good as the IRIX machines, , and infinitely more simple to maintain IMHO.
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Why do people always see MS behind the scenes
sowing dissension in the free Unix ranks? I will admit that MS has certainly questionable business practices but it doesn't typically openly try to do this, but rather subtly in the background (ie. make Netscape run slower on MS hosted sites, etc...)
I even got a similar response like this one to my editorial in this month's Daemon News. I swear people think Bill Gates is like the Wizard of Oz and hiding behind every curtain.
Damn - I'd hate it everyone had an OS or software that worked.
The point is that the BSD license allows more freedom of use because companies will not use the GPL or they won't survive since they can't sell their value-added product because the GPL would force them to give the source to it to everyone, including their competitors.
Do you honestly expect WordPerfect, Oracle, or any of the other big commercial vendors who've jumped on the Linux bandwagon (primarily for the PR) to actually release their source? Not a chance.
The BSD license gives everyone the chance to have a good fill_in_the_blank. Witness the TCP/IP stack that the Internet lives on - from BSD.
There's a vast difference between science and code and licenses. Sheesh.
Let's see, you say that alchemy was broken by the open publishing of research? Did you know that Newton, often thought of as the father of modern physics, who's laws we use to this day (assuming velocities are low and we're in a weak field of gravity) was an alchemist? Do you know how he spent the last few years of his life? Read also about how Tycho Brahe kept his observational data of the planets' motion away from Kepler while he lived in hopes that he could figure out the motion of the planets. You can go read Carl Sagan's Cosmos and find out.
If you honestly think the license argument is at all related to alchemy vs. "science" then you vastly misunderstand how scientists (including alchemists) work.
If M$ is scared of Linux (and I don't think they really are - whether they should be is another question) and not of *BSD, it's certainly not because Linux uses the GPL. If they are scared it's because of the userbase of Linux and the hype it's been getting in the media.
Looking at growth trends, FreeBSD is essentially on the same growth curve as Linux but 2-3 years behind (attributable to the 4.4-BSD court case and the switch to the 4.4-BSD-lite code.)
So why doesn't M$ just take the existing Free, Net, and Open BSD code, merge together what they
want and release it as M$ BSD or M$ Linux or whatever? They're free to do it - will they? No.
Will M$ make a M$-Linux - no, and it won't be because of the license....
As Doug points out, Emacs and XEmacs are GPL'd (does this other guy even know who wrote Emacs? and he's in favor of the GPL... sigh). Anyway, NetBSD and OpenBSD split because of personality conflicts in the core team. Has the code forked? Um no. All of the BSDs borrow code from the others.
Why people think the BSD license forks code and the GPL is somehow immune to this? Gcc vs egcs, libc vs glibc etc are fine examples of GPL projects splitting.
You can now use x11amp without OSS on FreeBSD - you need to enable Luigi's sound drivers in the kernel.
I don't recall him saying that it was faster under FreeBSD although there is some evidence that some software does run faster under emulation than natively on Linux.
At least FreeBSD (I don't have lots of experience with Net or Open) has ports for all of the above. I've tried WordPerfect under FreeBSD's Linux emulation and it works fine - I use LaTeX for most everything so I haven't used it much though. KDE, Gnome and over 2100 other ports are available for install by simply typing "make install" in the port directory. I find it much easier than using RPMs in my experience.
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