[nycbug-talk] FreeBSD Testimonials and Support

[Isaac Levy]

Wordup Pete, Gordon, All,

On Apr 14, 2005, at 2:21 PM, pete wright wrote:

> personally I would not worry too much about the SCO case currently.
>> From what I've read about it, the whole things seems like a trade/IP
> dispute between SCO and IBM.  The linux kernel seems to be involved in
> this for sure, but I don't think it marks the end of linux
> development.  And if I remember correctly Novel or HP or some vendor
> has offered idemnity to linux using clients, but still I think it's a
> bit too early to worry about this.

I'd agree the SCO debacle is pretty much a moot point now for Linux 
dev- but it is noteworthy that the BSD's already went through this 
exact mess, back in the early 90's, and came out on top.  (The BSD 
developers did indeed have systemV code in there, so they ripped it 
out, rewrote what was necessary, and moved on.)

> Although, having said that the BSD liscense has already been tried in
> courts and is much less greedy and restrictive than the GPL liscense.

I'll second that, and without meaning to be negative here, I'll toss 
this recent slashdot news posting in:

'GPL 3.0 to Penalize Google, Amazon?'
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/08/2148207&tid=98&tid=106
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3495981

Very uncool, freedom fascism, IMHO.  (I'll be tossing flames to 
/dev/null on those words btw).
Wether or not the GPL 3.0 is applied to retroactively penalize various 
companies or not, it's the *possibility* here that makes my heart sink- 
this kind of junk hurts everyone in Open Source.

/me shrugs and draws a clean line on the ground to step away from that 
muck...

I'll stick to the *BSD's for more than just the respective tight OS 
codebases, deep historical roots, and insanely solid performance- the 
Licensing is really important to me.

>  If I was going to base a product on any open techonology I would take
> a serious look at the BSD liscense and how it differs from the GPL
> (not to mention the MIT liscense and all the other one's listed on the
> OSI site).

I'd agree- in most cases, the BSD license gives a company the *most* 
freedom with the source, even the freedom to close it again in the 
future, if some situation/context calls for it.

Rocket-
.ike