BSD License????

[Jimen Ching]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
>This discussion also brings out an interesting issue, that is, it appears to
>be more difficult to port an open-sourced program into Linux than to port a
>proprietary one.  With the latter, what you're doing is to reverse-engineer
>the functions of the code.  Whereas, with an open-sourced program, it will be
>very difficult to argue that you are not translating (a form of copying) the
>code to a different form, even though you may be rewriting the entire code.

Yes, these issues are some of the things people are complaining about in
the free/open source software world.  Of course, these problems only arise
when you try to combine the source code.  Most projects I know are always
re-inventing the wheel anyway.  So these issues are kind of moot.  BSD has
their PF, Linux will get their own in time.  It is unfortunate that the
license is the major driver of these re-inventions.  But there are more
than enough engineers to do the work, so why worry?

Even if there are no licenses to drive these duplicate efforts, someone
will always want to do it anyway.  Look at the number of editors and
browsers and Wordprocessors and desktop environments.

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org