Optimal license for Java projects ...
David Johnson
david at usermode.org
Sat Mar 15 05:24:31 UTC 2003
On Friday 14 March 2003 08:34 pm, Gunther Schadow wrote:
> David, I'm a loyal BSD disciple for over 10 years and I would never
> put anything BSD down. It's just the very history of BSD that its
> code was used and close in by most commercial UNIX systems, HPUX,
> SunOS, Ultrix, etc.
I'm trying to recall my history, but didn't those systems fork off the
BSD code while it was still encumbered? At one time you had to have a
license from AT&T before you could legally use BSD code.
IIRC correctly, the only proprietary fork of BSD after it became
unencumbered was NeXT. It would be interesting to hear from Steve Jobs
why he made NeXT closed but Darwin open. I suspect it was due to the
pressure of trying to keep a closed fork in sync with a moving open
target.
> It's amazing how bad the shells still are on
> Solaris or HPUX systems even today compared to my FreeBSD sh. This
> whole mess has in the end contributed to BSD coming out second in
> the open source world behind Linux, and I am still suffering under
> that (the world is just unfair ;-)
Don't talk to me about proprietary shells! I have to maintain a bunch of
dlsh scripts and for the life of me I can't find documentation on dlsh
anywhere. The man page consists of nothing more than an advert on how
wonderful a proprietary shell is.
Anyway, I would suggest that the reason for *BSD lagging behind Linux
and GNU was the AT&T lawsuit. For a long time no one wanted to touch
the code because it was in a legal limbo. By the time it got
unencumbered, Linux was already integrated and working, while BSD still
had six files to reimplement.
I would say the two big lessons learned from this whole mess are "never
write an free extension to a proprietary system" and "don't touch
shared source with a ten foot pole".
--
David Johnson
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