On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 19:33, Roland wrote:
At 01:58 PM 2/18/02 -0600, Sean Farley wrote:
They have release Darwin as well as an NFS testing tool. FreeBSD did benefit a lot from that testing tool.
Yes, I have read that by now. This is another point in favour of the BSD license.
No, that's a point in *Apples* favour. The BSD license did not make Apple give anything back; they were not required to participate. They could have taken, without ever contributing. But, Apple feels a sense of community. Hell, they are almost single-handedly responsible for the initial PC revolution (pre-IBM-pc days).
Granted, they also have a sense of money, too.
Take, for instance, Microsoft's attempted hijacking of the Kerberos protocol. MS almost took an accepted standard, and almost perverted it to their ends, by using free software that did not require anything of them.
For those of you sleeping last year, the MIT license allowed Microsoft to use the Kerberos source code without any real requirements. Microsoft used the extension "feature" of Kerberos to enable MS operating systems to participate in a Kerberos domain, but a standard Kerberos system could not participate in a Microsoft Kerberos domain.
Besides, as the owner of a company, he can always decide not to develop code for those potential customers who wish to keep the resulting code closed.
Of course he can do that. But this means losing a lot of customers to other companies. The xGPL would prevent this.
Roland
Okay, I'm a strong supporter of the GPL. But this is just selfish.
- Tony