Optimal license for Java projects ...

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Sat Mar 15 06:16:27 UTC 2003


Quoting Gunther Schadow (gunther at aurora.regenstrief.org):

> 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.  But this
> move ended up not helping BSD and customers of these proprietory BSD
> derivatives could never get themselves upgraded to any of the
> improvements of subsequent BSDs.

In other words, such forks' history shows that they've tended to be
temporary and/or lose momentum because they cease to fully benefit from
the exchange of code and information in the larger BSD community.  In
other words, the loss was mostly theirs.  Witness how badly proprietary
*ixes still tend to suck, to this day, compared to {Free|Net|Open}BSD.

> What's worse, the UNIX brands who were boosted by BSD initially
> then turned around and even betrayed BSD alltogether by trying to
> become more System V compliant.

Yes, but my recollection is that this was partly a reaction to the
lawsuit, and partly the result of SysVr4 incorporating practically all
of BSD's userspace.

> [...]  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 ;-)

But, again, I'd say that was almostly entirely a secondary effect of the
lawsuit.  (I was a 386BSD user, back then.  Things could have gone
entirely differently.)

-- 
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Rick Moen   not-for-profit, locally-owned-and-operated, cooperatively-managed,
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