Caldera OpenUnix 8

epsas at inflicted.net epsas at inflicted.net
Sun Aug 19 13:02:51 PDT 2001


On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 07:54:25AM -1000, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
> 
> OTOH, since Caldera follows the letters of GNU, I don't see anything wrong 
> with what it is doing.  In fact, I commend Caldera for promoting an 
> alternative, for-profit, business model for the open source community.  

Wayne, I understand why you may feel it's important to defend Caldera, but you have to realize that Ransom Love and Caldera Inc. do NOT want to continue using the GPL with their operating systems.  

This is the company that applauded Microsoft's public relations war on the GPL.  This is the company that has plans for adopting a per-seat licensing system for thir OSes.  This is not a company that  believes in the spirit of open development and Free software;  their purchase of SCO has only crystallized that suspicion.

Adopting a non-Free licensing scheme for my software is not going to help it succeed in this market.  In fact, it will only help it fail - Nobody has the money to spend on expensive licenses, look at Genuity's Black Rocket or Oracle 8i...  and the hordes of unemployed coders won't give a damn about hacking on my proprietary piece of software.


> If someone from our isles puts together a set of scripts on top of 
> theopen-source distributions which make a Linux desktop much more acceptable 
> to the business community (say, law offices, accountants, dentists/doctors' 
> offices, etc.), and charges as much as the buyer is willing to pay, I am sure 
> he or she will receive our full blessings.  Why should we treat Caldera 
> differently?


If someone from the isles wants to develop a set of GPLed wrapper scripts for their favorite distribution, and then sell it for as much as the buyer is willing to pay for it - I'd say, go for it.  That situation would have very few parallels with the Caldera corporation's hypocrisy unless that individual decided to release those scripts as a compiled binary under a proprietary license (Which Caldera did with Lizard before they folded to pressure and released it under an Open Source license).  



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