[luau] NEWS: MS-funded think tank propagates open-source lies

[Jimen Ching]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Dean Fujioka wrote:
>The BSD license is good because it allows corporations to benefit from other
>people's work without offering them any compensation, and without having to
>allow third parties to benefit from derived work.
>
>FreeBSD is bad?

It depends on your goals.  The goals of open source and free software are
to share source code and ideas.  The description above does not seem to do
this.  I.e. I am sharing my source code, but they are not sharing theirs.

If you look closely at very large and complex software like Linux, Apache,
X Window, GCC, Samba, etc, you will see that people who are working on
these software are full time developers paid by commercial companies.  If
you look at X Window, features like Xinerama and 3D support, those things
are contributed by commercial companies.  In Linux, I doubt we would have
a new VM or journalling file systems if it wasn't for commercial
companies.

Does the license matter?  Definitely.  Two examples I can think of are GCC
and X Window.  With GCC, NeXT used GCC's backend and developed an
Objective C frontend.  But NeXT did not want to release the source code.
Since GCC was under the GPL, they were forced to release it.  As a result,
we now have a free Objective C compiler.  This would not have happened
without such licenses.  The second example is X Window.  The X consortium
wanted to change the licensing of the X Window source code, in essence
making it proprietary.  This would have forced the Xfree86 project to fork
the tree.  But the community complained and the license was reverted back
to the original X license.

This occured because the X license allows it.  If it were under the GPL,
this would have never occured.  Threats like these occur about once a year
because of licenses like the BSDL.  The only way OSS and Free Software
will work is if everyone contributes.  This means both OSS developers and
OSS users, including companies that want to use OSS.  Large complex
software will never come about if they are developed on the weekends.

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