On Wednesday 03 January 2007 09:06, Vinayak Hegde wrote: > On 12/29/06, jtd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Not at all. IF the FSF had not done what it did, THEN the others > > would have been history. > > > > As for BSD inspite of having all the advantages that they did a > > full 4 years ahead of linux they have (mostly) fallen behind. > > There are other reasons for BSD falling behind. The major reason > being the lawsuit.
The case was filed in 90. And settled in 93 at which point bsd was still far far ahead in the race. > Linus has gone on record saying that he wuld > never have developed on Linux were it not for the lawsuit. You need > to get your facts right. Also till the recent past (about 2-3 > years), Freebsd was neck-to-neck with Linux in terms of technology. I would place that at 2001. And that is precisely my point. How come it fell behind. IMO because of the licence which fosters a certain development model. As KG puts it "it's the development model, not the licence". I dont agree wholly with that as it's essentially the licence which creates the eco system and also gurantees good behaviour by the participants, over short term gains. In the case of BSD the licence creates an ecosystem which is useful for certain goals but relies on "market forces" to prevent errant and counterproductive behaviour. Unfortunately market forces actually rewards such behaviour in the short term. And if gamed properly, for a substantially longer period, relative to product cycles. The result is very visible. Also the mutants keep poisoning the field with legal mines. Which requires changes in the licence. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
