On Sunday 25 February 2007 16:47, rwh wrote: > Mike Miller wrote: > > Open source has been doing great things for us. Maybe you > > haven't been around long enough to appreciate this. It's an > > entirely different software world now, largely because of the > > FOSS movement. I think the future of FOSS looks very bright. > > I've been writing code since the late '60's so I've seen most stuff > go by three or four times already :-) People had been donating > software to the 'cause' for quite some time before RMS published > his Dr. Dobbs article in '85. And trust me, I've been in enough > development meetings to know that wrapping code in a layer of > political dogma and legal ambiguity doesn't make it any easier to > sell to management. > > > I think it is better that code is not used at all than that it is > > used within a proprietary program that competes with a decent > > FOSS option. If it can't make it as FOSS, it isn't all that great > > and I am happy to see it die. > > I guess we'll have to disagree and each license our code as we see > fit. > > --rick Professionally I work for a company that distributes a product based on both open and closed source code. It goes out the door as a sort of kiosk. The operating system is heavily based on FreesBIE which is of course heavily based on FreeBSD. A lot of work I do on the FreesBIE parts of the system are made available to the FreesBIE people to incorporate into their project. (It's getting to the point where it's looking like I might end up with commit access to their repository actually...) But by the same token, it's a kiosk machine for a very specialized purpose and having to distribute the source code to it would be a needless expense, not to mention there are some tricks in there we're really not ready to 'give away'. So you can see that the BSDL is highly attractive to us, in fact the GPL essentially makes code under that license unusable to us. So I guess you have to ask yourself the question: As a developer, if you want your code to get use, which license makes more sense? I've been using OSS since before the term existed. I remember installing linux before it had an installer, when it needed minix to bootstrap. linux's viability as an OS early on was heavily dependant on a reasonably complete userland from GNU that could get dropped in to the system. It's interesting to note that linux can borrow BSD licensed code far easier than any of the BSD projects can borrow linux/GPL code and that various linux camps have started projects to graft big chunks of BSD into linux (ala the gentoo-freebsd project or the now defunct debian-bsd project) or maybe it's graft chunks of linux into BSD? Maybe Microsoft wouldn't have the market dominance they have today if they hadn't been able to graft the BSD TCP stack into their OS, maybe the world would be a better place if the BSD TCP stack was really GPLd....although I'm not quite sure how. Having to write their own stack would've kept windows off the internet and contributed to their lack of viability as an OS? I find that unlikely. Realistically, I have nothing against FOSS, there isn't a single piece of non-FOSS software I use personally, but by the same token I make my living writing some code that has to be kept proprietary and this world without closed source software would cut out a very profitable part of my business. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel