I wish I had caught this thread earlier, for I have some important points to make...
Many have pointed out that you do not need to send a cd with each system, as long as you make the source code available on demand for three years.
Well, this is not as easy as it seems. Consider, for instance, that your company go bankrupt tomorrow. That's a nasty legal liability on your shoulders... What if you completely change your business focus? After all, things in the computer business change a lot. You'll be saddled with maintaining this source code and a formal channel to provide it on demand for three full years *after* you stopped selling the product.
Also, you have to remember that you'll need to keep control of the versions of the software you ship your product with. If you distribute three different revisions of the product in a single month, just for the sake of correcting three different bugs, that's three versions of the source code you'll have to keep for three years, and be able to identify which corresponds to what your client bought. Of course, you could ignore this and stay illegal and vulnerable to a class-action lawsuit. You don't want that, do you?
All in all... you should have gone BSD. No, this is not a flame bait, it's just my personal opinion. Based on the above.
There are some serious problems with the line of thought presented in the article.
First, right there in the beginning it states that commercial vendors of Unix differenciated their products to gain an edge over their competitors. Right. And what would happen if the code was GPLed? They would have differenciated their products to gain an edge over their competitors. GPL does nothing to prevent that.
Second, the ninja programmers... It implies that because the code is made available, it's more difficult to fork. Not so. Here are some cases:
1) Two different groups implement the same feature in different ways. The only way of "unifying" is discarding one of the implementations. Neither group wants that, so they stay the way they are. (See IPv6 implementations story, though they did finally agree to unify after a few years -- they were not commercial vendors, though.)
2) The differenciation is made in a way that makes Linus unhappy. The code is not merged. See devfs for Linux.
3) Two teams make changes that are mutually incompatible. For instance, new bus vs new config in FreeBSD. Each one thinks their way is the best way, and there is simply no way to have it both ways.
4) I fork, introduce innovations. Linus put them in Linux. Then he puts more stuff in Linux. I do not put that stuff, and continue my own development. The source eventually becomes too different for my code to be backported to Linux. The fork stays.
A fork happens because PEOPLE WANT IT TO HAPPEN. Not the users, sure enough, the developers. They either want to *be* different so they can lock their customers, or they do not agree with the way something is being done, or they do not want to give up on code that turns out to have also been done by someone else in a different way, or they have personality clashes with other developers. GPL does nothing to solve any of the above.
On a side note, FreeBSD and NetBSD originated from 386BSD, OpenBSD did not. They had different aims from the very start. OpenBSD is a splint from NetBSD. One can sure view it as originated by different goals, but the main reason was personality clash. (And none of them above would have been in any way different if the code was GPLed, obviously.)
Linux gets world domination. Microsoft and IBM decide to release their own Linux. Being competitors, they make their house changes intentionally incompatible.
What do you do:
1) Adopt the crappy code from Microsoft, resulting in two forks. 2) Adopt the crappy code from IBM, resulting in two forks. 3) Implement a third variant which can be set up by the user to be compatible with either the Microsoft or the IBM code, resulting in three forks. 4) Forget about the crappy code, since it is crappy, resulting in three forks.
All these versions of Spice are commercial. They are different because their producers wanted them to be different, to set them apart from each other. If the code was GPLed, it would not change a single yota in the fact that these people *wanted* to be incompatible, so they could lock their customers.
Now, what GPL might have done is stop anyone from producing a commercial version of Spice. We would still be using the free version of Spice (which is still available, y'know), without any single penny of commercial development put into it.
If you like that, why don't you just stay with the free version?
I write an Operating System. Full with GUI and all. And, hey, you have a four thousand lines driver I'd like to use. Sure, I don't mind distributing the source code for your driver, and preserve your GPL license.
But, why the hell should I GPL all the millions of lines of code I wrote that have nothing to do with your driver?
That's the whole problem. GPL wants every piece of software anyone writes to *become* GPLed if one happens to mix that source with GPLed source. GPL just cannot "live and let live". It *must* take control of everything.
Well, good luck. One day you'll find out that there is a lot of good stuff out there that people objects to being taken control by GPL.
... UTSL. Frankly, it shows that you are a bit too lazy to browse "tons" of source files, because you obviously haven't ever looked at one to claim something like "most without any comments". Hah. Pfff.
For people who are actually interested in getting their hands dirty, there are drivers examples in/usr/share/examples, though I'm not sure how up-to-date they are. There are a couple of bumps in the road for FreeBSD developers:
1) From 2.2.x to 3.x, the SCSI subsystem was dumped and replaced with CAM. Alas, now that 3.x is the -stable line, one need not concern with that.
2) On 4.x we are introducing the "newbus" architecture. This makes the probe&attachment of drivers quite different between -current and -stable. Anyone who *actually* wrote a driver knows, though, that probe&attachment is just a minor part of the driver.
The VM system has been revamped, though most drivers don't get affected by that. The VFS is in line for a complete revamp too, though it's dubious whether this will be done before 4.x becomes -stable.
Aside from that, just pick a driver that's similar to what you intend to develop, subscribe to the appropriate mailing list, and go ahead. If you want recommendations on what drivers would be good models, ask on the appropriate mailing list or on -hackers (don't cross-post).
... you wouldn't found so much antagonism if you checked out the places where people who *use* FreeBSD use to talk. I mean, IRC? Please, do me a favor: go to a popular, well-known, IRC Linux channel (#linux?:), and say you are a BSD user who never used Linux before and want to try it. I'd be very surprised if you go a different reaction.
Anyway, the BSD communities, AFAIK, use mailing lists. IRC channels and Usenet get a very different crowd.
As for web sites... what web sites are you talking about? The official FreeBSD site is www.freebsd.org, and I don't think there is anything denigrating Linux there. If there is, please e-mail me and I'll personally remove the offending text immediatly.
I'd like to point out that this was Slashdot's fault. The Gartner group is very serious and reliable. If the links to the article were published, instead of links to a third party commenting on the article, it would have avoided all this confusion.
Actually, I think it goes to show that BSD people are not so lacking in self-confidence that they need to talk just to hear their own voice, or write silly "first posts" just to read their words.
It is not in the least surprising that it's a non-BSDer who did it.
It's disappointing to see that most people chose to focus on whether a BSD section is needed or not instead of discussing the topic at hand: the coming convention.
I'm going to refrain to point out how silly your whole argument is, not to mention the many problems with it (like the fact that human activies, such as, for instance, cooking:-), use much higher temperatures that 100F, or that winters in many places easily go below -40, so the whole crap about 0F to 100F being the effective usable range is just that -- crap -- not to mention that the explanation on how these values where selected was incorrect), but let me chime in with some information:
Living temperatures are given in tenths of Celsius in any place in the world (except the US, of course). So, that's 550 versus ~100.:-)
The don't cut corners? Construction industry is one of the more corrupts in Japan, with close connections to the yakuza.
A few months ago a piece of the ceiling in a tunnel fell over a bullet train. It turned out to have been built underspec. They conducted a test on other tunnels, and found that 60% of them were built underspec.
When the japanese say don't have corruption, what they really mean is that they don't have it done illegaly (well, it was not illegal until recently).
They are very upset about nuclear weapons. Prefectures with port facilities often upset the central government by passing laws, issuing edicts or things like that demanding that any ships using the port facilities be declared nuclear weapons-free, which goes against US Navy policy (saying whether there are weapons or not).
Anyway, while there is a healthy amount of people protesting against nuclear everything, this is a small island nation of 110 million people. One has to generate energy in some way. And, in the end, nuclear energy is the one that does the least damage to the environment, given Japan geography. They don't have any other viable option, at the present.
Meanwhile, I have watched four straight hours of news, most of it the nuclear accident, with an occasional weather forecast. I'm tired, I'm going.
Really, they are. Look, the GPL covers the terms under which the software must be distributed. If the GPLed software is not being distributed, the GPL terms do not apply (well, they do, under the parts that you may not sue it's authors).
So, Corel has a product, which is under development, and they will one day distribute. When they start distributing it, it must be under GPL.
Right now, they are going into the beta phase of product development. In this phase, the product is tested by a select group of people, under a contract with the company (Corel).
What might be confusing people is that the OSS efforts on the net, like Linux, do not distinguish between beta phases and releases. At most, they have a "reliability" indicator.
The product Corel is developing is being developed in a closed way, and GPL does not forbid that.
Let's remember that most commercial products started and trived in Brazil without a portuguese version.
...and yet, the explosion of computer usage had to wait for portuguese versions of such software. Remember when brazilian text processors competed well, thank you, with imported ones? Do you remember how that changed when software like MS Word was localized?
We'll first see the day when machine-translation becomes widespread than have large populations become english-proficient (that is, non english-speaking large populations).
Don't get me wrong, I think anyone who won't read english in these days is an idiot, but, surprisingly, that doesn't seem to change the world one bit.
Most people working in the information business in Brazil don't know english, and that's that. And, guess what? They can get jobs fine, thank you. And why not? AIX, HP-UX, MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000) are all available in portuguese.
I wonder how the japanese managed to become the world's second largest economy (with a relatively small population) from the ashes that they were left with after WWII in just three decades, when EVERYTHING they have is in japanese. English usage? Nil.
I also wonder why every big software company translates all their software into dozens of other languages.
All IBM software I have ever seen (in the 90s, at least) can "speak" portuguese fine, thank you. It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.
If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.
It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.
First, while documentation might be available in portuguese, the messages of the operating system itself are not so easily translated, because the way the operating system is written does little to support it.
To whom does this matter? Actually, to a lot of people. These people don't know english, and cannot be bothered to learn it. And, guess what?, that's fine, because Microsoft sells stuff to them which is completely in portuguese. Heck, even commercial Unixes like AIX or HP-UX can be set up to be portuguese-only.
In other words, some things must be changed in the way applications are written to support translation/localization, or Linux will always be relegated to a small share in non english-speaking countries.
As for the web site, it is in portuguese. It's just that they will sometimes translate some of their pages to english, for the benefit of english-speakers, and that's the page you saw.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be glad to help you, but you did not leave an e-mail...
Alas, if sysinstall touched a disk, is because you told it to. There is *no way* it could have touched it without you selecting it.
Anyway, e-mail me if you want. Or e-mail freebsd-questions@freebsd.org.
I wish I had caught this thread earlier, for I have some important points to make...
Many have pointed out that you do not need to send a cd with each system, as long as you make the source code available on demand for three years.
Well, this is not as easy as it seems. Consider, for instance, that your company go bankrupt tomorrow. That's a nasty legal liability on your shoulders... What if you completely change your business focus? After all, things in the computer business change a lot. You'll be saddled with maintaining this source code and a formal channel to provide it on demand for three full years *after* you stopped selling the product.
Also, you have to remember that you'll need to keep control of the versions of the software you ship your product with. If you distribute three different revisions of the product in a single month, just for the sake of correcting three different bugs, that's three versions of the source code you'll have to keep for three years, and be able to identify which corresponds to what your client bought. Of course, you could ignore this and stay illegal and vulnerable to a class-action lawsuit. You don't want that, do you?
All in all... you should have gone BSD. No, this is not a flame bait, it's just my personal opinion. Based on the above.
There are some serious problems with the line of thought presented in the article.
First, right there in the beginning it states that commercial vendors of Unix differenciated their products to gain an edge over their competitors. Right. And what would happen if the code was GPLed? They would have differenciated their products to gain an edge over their competitors. GPL does nothing to prevent that.
Second, the ninja programmers... It implies that because the code is made available, it's more difficult to fork. Not so. Here are some cases:
1) Two different groups implement the same feature in different ways. The only way of "unifying" is discarding one of the implementations. Neither group wants that, so they stay the way they are. (See IPv6 implementations story, though they did finally agree to unify after a few years -- they were not commercial vendors, though.)
2) The differenciation is made in a way that makes Linus unhappy. The code is not merged. See devfs for Linux.
3) Two teams make changes that are mutually incompatible. For instance, new bus vs new config in FreeBSD. Each one thinks their way is the best way, and there is simply no way to have it both ways.
4) I fork, introduce innovations. Linus put them in Linux. Then he puts more stuff in Linux. I do not put that stuff, and continue my own development. The source eventually becomes too different for my code to be backported to Linux. The fork stays.
A fork happens because PEOPLE WANT IT TO HAPPEN. Not the users, sure enough, the developers. They either want to *be* different so they can lock their customers, or they do not agree with the way something is being done, or they do not want to give up on code that turns out to have also been done by someone else in a different way, or they have personality clashes with other developers. GPL does nothing to solve any of the above.
On a side note, FreeBSD and NetBSD originated from 386BSD, OpenBSD did not. They had different aims from the very start. OpenBSD is a splint from NetBSD. One can sure view it as originated by different goals, but the main reason was personality clash. (And none of them above would have been in any way different if the code was GPLed, obviously.)
Linux gets world domination. Microsoft and IBM decide to release their own Linux. Being competitors, they make their house changes intentionally incompatible.
What do you do:
1) Adopt the crappy code from Microsoft, resulting in two forks.
2) Adopt the crappy code from IBM, resulting in two forks.
3) Implement a third variant which can be set up by the user to be compatible with either the Microsoft or the IBM code, resulting in three forks.
4) Forget about the crappy code, since it is crappy, resulting in three forks.
See? It's a fallacy the non-fork argument.
The BSD license has nothing to do with it.
All these versions of Spice are commercial. They are different because their producers wanted them to be different, to set them apart from each other. If the code was GPLed, it would not change a single yota in the fact that these people *wanted* to be incompatible, so they could lock their customers.
Now, what GPL might have done is stop anyone from producing a commercial version of Spice. We would still be using the free version of Spice (which is still available, y'know), without any single penny of commercial development put into it.
If you like that, why don't you just stay with the free version?
I write an Operating System. Full with GUI and all. And, hey, you have a four thousand lines driver I'd like to use. Sure, I don't mind distributing the source code for your driver, and preserve your GPL license.
But, why the hell should I GPL all the millions of lines of code I wrote that have nothing to do with your driver ?
That's the whole problem. GPL wants every piece of software anyone writes to *become* GPLed if one happens to mix that source with GPLed source. GPL just cannot "live and let live". It *must* take control of everything.
Well, good luck. One day you'll find out that there is a lot of good stuff out there that people objects to being taken control by GPL.
... UTSL. Frankly, it shows that you are a bit too lazy to browse "tons" of source files, because you obviously haven't ever looked at one to claim something like "most without any comments". Hah. Pfff.
/usr/share/examples, though I'm not sure how up-to-date they are. There are a couple of bumps in the road for FreeBSD developers:
For people who are actually interested in getting their hands dirty, there are drivers examples in
1) From 2.2.x to 3.x, the SCSI subsystem was dumped and replaced with CAM. Alas, now that 3.x is the -stable line, one need not concern with that.
2) On 4.x we are introducing the "newbus" architecture. This makes the probe&attachment of drivers quite different between -current and -stable. Anyone who *actually* wrote a driver knows, though, that probe&attachment is just a minor part of the driver.
The VM system has been revamped, though most drivers don't get affected by that. The VFS is in line for a complete revamp too, though it's dubious whether this will be done before 4.x becomes -stable.
Aside from that, just pick a driver that's similar to what you intend to develop, subscribe to the appropriate mailing list, and go ahead. If you want recommendations on what drivers would be good models, ask on the appropriate mailing list or on -hackers (don't cross-post).
... you wouldn't found so much antagonism if you checked out the places where people who *use* FreeBSD use to talk. I mean, IRC? Please, do me a favor: go to a popular, well-known, IRC Linux channel (#linux? :), and say you are a BSD user who never used Linux before and want to try it. I'd be very surprised if you go a different reaction.
Anyway, the BSD communities, AFAIK, use mailing lists. IRC channels and Usenet get a very different crowd.
As for web sites... what web sites are you talking about? The official FreeBSD site is www.freebsd.org, and I don't think there is anything denigrating Linux there. If there is, please e-mail me and I'll personally remove the offending text immediatly.
I'd like to point out that this was Slashdot's fault. The Gartner group is very serious and reliable. If the links to the article were published, instead of links to a third party commenting on the article, it would have avoided all this confusion.
Actually, I think it goes to show that BSD people are not so lacking in self-confidence that they need to talk just to hear their own voice, or write silly "first posts" just to read their words.
It is not in the least surprising that it's a non-BSDer who did it.
It's disappointing to see that most people chose to focus on whether a BSD section is needed or not instead of discussing the topic at hand: the coming convention.
I'm going to refrain to point out how silly your whole argument is, not to mention the many problems with it (like the fact that human activies, such as, for instance, cooking :-), use much higher temperatures that 100F, or that winters in many places easily go below -40, so the whole crap about 0F to 100F being the effective usable range is just that -- crap -- not to mention that the explanation on how these values where selected was incorrect), but let me chime in with some information:
:-)
Living temperatures are given in tenths of Celsius in any place in the world (except the US, of course). So, that's 550 versus ~100.
A 7.4 earthquake on Mexico. I'm pretty sure it's all the bad vibes from these millenium sects followers... :-)
The don't cut corners? Construction industry is one of the more corrupts in Japan, with close connections to the yakuza.
A few months ago a piece of the ceiling in a tunnel fell over a bullet train. It turned out to have been built underspec. They conducted a test on other tunnels, and found that 60% of them were built underspec.
When the japanese say don't have corruption, what they really mean is that they don't have it done illegaly (well, it was not illegal until recently).
1) There is no "residential area" in Japan. Remember that this is an OLD country, and they build things on reclaimed land.
2) I defy you to find a place in Japan without anyone 350 meters from it that can site such an installation.
They are very upset about nuclear weapons. Prefectures with port facilities often upset the central government by passing laws, issuing edicts or things like that demanding that any ships using the port facilities be declared nuclear weapons-free, which goes against US Navy policy (saying whether there are weapons or not).
Anyway, while there is a healthy amount of people protesting against nuclear everything, this is a small island nation of 110 million people. One has to generate energy in some way. And, in the end, nuclear energy is the one that does the least damage to the environment, given Japan geography. They don't have any other viable option, at the present.
Meanwhile, I have watched four straight hours of news, most of it the nuclear accident, with an occasional weather forecast. I'm tired, I'm going.
(from 110km of the accident)
... I'm very glad to be in the BSD camp.
From now on, if anyone ask me why I prefer the BSD license over GPL, I'll just point to this thread.
So, Corel has a product, which is under development, and they will one day distribute. When they start distributing it, it must be under GPL.
Right now, they are going into the beta phase of product development. In this phase, the product is tested by a select group of people, under a contract with the company (Corel).
What might be confusing people is that the OSS efforts on the net, like Linux, do not distinguish between beta phases and releases. At most, they have a "reliability" indicator.
The product Corel is developing is being developed in a closed way, and GPL does not forbid that.
Cool down, people. Nobody is stealing code.
Yeah! Let's also ban any mention of Red Hat, Debian, Slackware...
...and yet, the explosion of computer usage had to wait for portuguese versions of such software. Remember when brazilian text processors competed well, thank you, with imported ones? Do you remember how that changed when software like MS Word was localized?
We'll first see the day when machine-translation becomes widespread than have large populations become english-proficient (that is, non english-speaking large populations).
Don't get me wrong, I think anyone who won't read english in these days is an idiot, but, surprisingly, that doesn't seem to change the world one bit.
To be candid, that's just not true.
Most people working in the information business in Brazil don't know english, and that's that. And, guess what? They can get jobs fine, thank you. And why not? AIX, HP-UX, MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000) are all available in portuguese.
I wonder how the japanese managed to become the world's second largest economy (with a relatively small population) from the ashes that they were left with after WWII in just three decades, when EVERYTHING they have is in japanese. English usage? Nil.
I also wonder why every big software company translates all their software into dozens of other languages.
Maybe... maybe it just might be you are wrong?
All IBM software I have ever seen (in the 90s, at least) can "speak" portuguese fine, thank you. It's very simple, people will use software they can understand, and for a lot of people around the world, that means software not in english.
If Linux won't provide such a solution, that's fine. Microsoft is very considerate of the needs of non english-speaking countries.
It's sad a day when you get more consideration out of Microsoft than out of an OSS proponent.
No correctly written software was broken, that I'm sure of.
Maybe you ought to familiarize yourself with things like the LANG environment variable?
Let's get some facts straight.
First, while documentation might be available in portuguese, the messages of the operating system itself are not so easily translated, because the way the operating system is written does little to support it.
To whom does this matter? Actually, to a lot of people. These people don't know english, and cannot be bothered to learn it. And, guess what?, that's fine, because Microsoft sells stuff to them which is completely in portuguese. Heck, even commercial Unixes like AIX or HP-UX can be set up to be portuguese-only.
In other words, some things must be changed in the way applications are written to support translation/localization, or Linux will always be relegated to a small share in non english-speaking countries.
As for the web site, it is in portuguese. It's just that they will sometimes translate some of their pages to english, for the benefit of english-speakers, and that's the page you saw.