It's a lot like complaining that your bull is counterproductive because it isn't a cow and therefore won't yield milk.

If one's definition of "productive" is "expands the amount of software in the universe that is non-proprietary," then perhaps the BSD license is "non-productive" -- but that was never its goal.

The license serves to improve the amount of reusable software in the universe -- and in doing so, the quality of that code -- and in the process, the idea that entities could leverage it to build proprietary extensions is in the mix.

Many companies have built products with proprietary components using BSD-licensed baselines. Rather than start from scratch, they ended up with products that were less expensive and higher-quality. For many of these companies, religious compliance to software liberation is not a pill they would consider swallowing.

On 8/22/10 5:25 PM, Garry wrote:
This is a conversation held on a UK group page, can you confirm or deny this
as twaddle.



Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor lock-in),
they do give a little back to BSDs, but have made sure that BSDs can't get
much off of them, but they can get a lot out of BSD.

Also, Windows uses  (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking for
instance.

So, in supporting/using BDS i would enevatibaly end up writing code for it,
or filing bugs or whatever.
(I have assisted with a few Linux drivers and written kernel patches, as
well as working on things like DirectX 3D 9 for Wine and work on KDE etc...)

Having seen how BDS license software has been used, to create highly tied
in, almost crippled proprietary software, I do not feel that I can support
software developed under such licenses.


Web-Kit has actually worked quite well as an open system, even though Apple
done a hostile take over of the project from KHTML in KDE.
So, the GPL has worked to produce an open product in Web-kit but the BSD
license has lead to vendor lock-in on the part of Microsoft and most
significantly Apple.

This does not mean to say that I have a problem with the quality of the code
in BSD, I just feel that the license is counter productive.

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"

Reply via email to