Draft 1 of the OpenDesk.com Public Source License

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, David Starner wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 10:38:38AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> > 
> > Sure.  And the amount of code sharing between NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD
> > is *much* greater, as best I can tell, than the code sharing between the
> > various Linux distributions.
> 
> How? Linux distributions, for the most part, have the same upstream source
> - to which most apply small, if any, patches to - for the main shell, for the 
> kernel, for shellutils, for fileutils, for libc, 

I'm not just talking about the kernel, I'm talking about the distributions
as a whole.  And I'm not going to get scientific and quantifiable about
it, I'm just relaying my experiences as a serious Linux (I run Debian on
my Vaio) and BSD (FreeBSD is what I run on most of my servers) user.
Dealing with the whole libc debacle has burned me pretty badly.  The LSB
is a great effort and I hope it really does result in less frivolous
divergence between the distributions, but since all but one of the distros
are commercial endeavors, there is always going to be a drive to see
"value-add" and "differentiation" that may not be technically based.
Whereas, *BSDs are all centrally not-for-profit (not non-profit, just
not-for-profit), so there is much less ego attached to the notion of
projects sharing code.  For example, even though OpenBSD might have a more
aggressive pool of code auditors, the bugs they fix do get pulled over to
FreeBSD and NetBSD, by and large.  Things could be better, of course - the
ports collection could be a shared resource between *BSD's.

> for most of the stuff that 
> the BSDs have seperate versions for.  

The utils aren't all that different between them, actually.  

> Anyway, I specifically didn't mention the free BSD's, as the reason they 
> forked probably has little to do with the license. 

Forking usually has very little to do with licenses.

> I was discussing SunOS,
> Aix, BSDi and the other proprietary Unixs that took some to most of their 
> code from BSD.

SunOS has been dead a long time.  BSDI is struggling.  AIX is several
generations past its BSD origins.  *BSD has more market share, I'd
estimate, than the three of those combined.  While BSD gave those
companies a temporary advantage, by keeping the fork proprietary those
companies missed out on further development.  Which is the main point the
BSD advocates make - more often than not, proprietary forks
provide a short-term advantage at best.  Sometimes that short-term
advantage is necessary to bring players into the space, but ultimately
they will find that participating in the project and differentiating
elsewhere is the most successful strategy.

	Brian