On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 11:59:40AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> 
> The second, example, is Mosix vs. OpenMosix. Mosix is an interesting cluster
> OS project from HUJI, that started its life as patches to a proprietary
> operating system (BSDI) but later became free software on top of Linux (see
> mosix.org). Someone who owned a company that tried to profit from Mosix
> decided to fork it to have better control over its development, and called
> the new free fork "OpenMosix", which implied that the original was "closed"
> in some way. This turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the
> developers of Mosix decided to turn it back to being proprietary :(


Mosix is a bad example. One of the lesser developers promoted himself as
the creator/developer/guiding light behind mosix which caused a lot
of resentment amoung everyone else who worked on it.

It was created by the efforts of a professor at HUJI and his team, along
with many people with small unsung roles. It was not the first attempt,
the Linux port was as you said from a BSD version, but there were previous
efforts built on UNIX with other names.


There are other examples of "open" programs actually being opened versions
of programs, for example Open Office being a COMPLETELY open version of
Star Office (which is MOSTLY but not 100% open source), or OpenAsterisk
which was created because the prime nonemployee contributor to Asterisk
had his GPL'ed code sold out from under him.


Geoff.



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