Re: GPL and Economics (was Re: GPL vs. sweatshops (was Re: Bias))

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Francois Gouget wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Brett Glass wrote:
> [...]
> > >Sure you may say that there is a mitigating factor in that one can build
> > >proprietary product on top of one of the above, but as I have shown
> > >before this can only be temporary, unless you manage to kill the
> > >community around your open-source competitor.
> >
> > Not true. Apple shows no sign of dying.
> 
> And they have a long history of realeasing products built on
> top of a BSD OS. Whooops, wait, not this is pretty recent.

Recent or not, OS X has been pretty successful, and it didn't require 
killing the BSD community to achieve success.

> And they don't sell any proprietary hardware either. Whoopsie, wait they
> do!

So?  Aren't they also selling OS X upgrades to people who already own the 
hardware?  If so, it's not just being driven by hardware sales.

Deven