Rob Hudson wrote:
> Other than the disadvantage of choosing a platform in the minority,
> what's the reason to choose a GPLd platform? Or, why NOT choose *BSD?
Technical reasons: many and varied, and they point in both directions.
I'm not prepared to go there, but I'll mention that I have boxes at
home running both. It's like the question, "Which power tool should I
buy?" Without more context, it's impossible to answer. *
Ideological reasons: the BSD license is demonstrably inferior at
promoting open source software. Various extremely useful systems have
been floating around for 20 years under BSD-like licenses, and
struggled to maintain critical mass. Two examples:
Example 1. BSD itself. First released by the University of California
around 1981 or 82. Adopted by some to run on VAXes. Co-opted
by Sun Microsystems and other vendors and made into
proprietary Unices. Never gained significant market share or
developer share because there was always a commercial version
that was slightly better, and only "free software zealots"
cared about improving the free version. The result was a
horribly fragmented Unix market as different vendors added
needed functionality in incompatible ways.
Contrast the history of BSD with the history of a certain
GPL'd OS whose name we've debated recently.
Example 2. The X Window System. X10 came out around 1987 or 88? X11
was wildly popular, ported to basically everything with a
screen. Vendors like SGI put huge proprietary extensions into
X like OpenGL (somewhat misnamed; don't be fooled). X
compatibility between vendors was much better than Unix
compatibility, but much less than perfect.
But 95% of the computers out there don't use X. They use
Windows, MacOS classic, or OS X (X is not the default window
system on OS X). And X development was stagnating overall,
and X had been pronounced dead, before a bunch of new
developers found it through Linux and started hacking new
stuff into it.
* I feel like that should be a koan.
The novice came to the master and said, "Master, I have SuSE
and OpenBSD and Debian and FreeBSD and RedHat CDs. Which
should I install on my PC?"
The master replied, "Go to the hardware store and buy me a
power tool."
The novice was confused. "But, Master, which tool shall I
buy?"
The master did not reply.
At that point, the novice was Enlightened.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
