On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Jacob Shaw wrote: > On 1/31/02 10:44 PM, "Larry Price" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I suspect that RMS has taken to using this as a test of ideological purity > see rms's reply especially the bit about "words are important" > <bsd bigot> > > You know... Jordan Hubbard isn't like this and his OS is truly free, as in, > you can take the source and do WHATEVER you want (Just ask the Windows 2000 > kernel & network IO teams, ahem). > > Time to start passing out those FreeBSD CD's at the meetings! > > </bsd bigot> > The BSD's are good operating systems, the machine i'm typing this on used to run freebsd before debian took over, and I'm running OpenBSD on my laptop. But, there is a reason that the linux kernel now runs on almost as many platforms as netbsd, that IBM, NEC, and oracle are picking up on GNU/Linux, and not *bsd; and that reason is the GPL. Not directly, true, and most of the major commercial players hated the idea from a business standpoint at first until they understood that while closed source (which is what BSD-licensed software becomes if you make changes and keep them private) provide a short-term advantage in tactical terms it kept them in the minority culture which is and will be a long-term strategic disadvantage.
This is all related to the fact that software is a cultural artifact, that is, while any given program may have some technical constraints, most of programming involves making choices that are as much stylistic, or idiomatic as anything else. I've got some notes toward an essay on how the software industry resembles the fashion industry, I guess I should make the time to write it up http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi)
