[nycbug-talk] Openness: was Extreme mobile BSD

[Trish Lynch]

Exactly - BSD in and of itself is a capitalist license - its one of the reasons I crawled onboard. It didn't *require* one to release code that made you unique, however it did allow things that were re-usable amongst a large group of people to be shared as long as I was not giving away something I saw asa valuable to myself and harmful to my bottom line to share. Things that were duplicated elsehwere, however were done much better with more peer review and more organization.

The nice thing about the BSD-style licensing is that the parts that made us unique we could keep in-house, develop ourselves and not have to give it to every hack out there to play with. Several companies too advantage of this model : Whistle (ultimately bought by IBM), Network Appliance, and F5 Networks (BigIP), Coyote Point (Equalizer), and others.

In the BSD world I am not required to be open, I don't have to share it with everyone, I *can* be selfish, I can make money - and that's exactly what Apple did. There is no better example of the BSD model at work than Apple's success with its later Macs and the later iPod and iPhone. The market penetration of BSD code is huge - but the things that make the it unique are not released. Nor should they be.

It seems like people like Miles have been spoiled by the Linux headspace of "everything must be free" - while I prefer "live free or die" - where freedom also includes the option to not have to give away things that I put work into and may make me money.

You want things for free - become a GNU-Linux proponent - most people on a BSD list are not going to listen to someone rant about one of the major things that make *BSD better than Linux. If you want that - go to NYLUG - just because of the general population of this list is tending towards clue - does not mean that its your idea of clue or that we're going to agree that closed tools that are useful are evil. The BSD license in and of itself teaches us entirely different.


-Trish
-- 
Trish Lynch
M: 646-401-1405
H: 201-378-0434  

-----Original Message-----
From: Yusuke Shinyama <yusuke at cs.nyu.edu>

Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:48:16 
To:Miles Nordin <carton at ivy.net>
Cc:talk at lists.nycbug.org
Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] Fw: Extreme mobile BSD


Hi Miles,

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:31:25 -0500, Miles Nordin <carton at Ivy.NET> wrote:
(snip)
>
> I'm pointing out the other tools are un-BSDish.  That's their relevant
> characteristic, and it's on topic, while you make it sound like open
> tools are some whimsical personal choice of mine.  They're not, not on
> this list.

I certainly don't wanna pour more oil onto the flame, but I'm
curious about what do you mean by "BSDish" in this context, and
how it's different from, say, "Unixy"?  I'm guessing you mean
the openness, but not every Unix is so open as *BSD, and
Linux has this kind of openness too.

I'd like to think the heart of the unixy principle is KISS,
and I really love this maxim (which I think is applicable to
all sorts of engineering), but it does not necessarily
coincide with the openness (although it generally does),
and this principle does not always characterize the current
development of *bsd. (Well, in fact, it seems to me that
almost every software project is going against this!)

Just attempting to cheer up an interesting discussion...

Yusuke
_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk at lists.nycbug.org
http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk