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

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Roland wrote:

> At 03:58 PM 6/13/02 -0400, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
> >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.
> 
> HAHAHAHA, I think this is a joke. The point is AFAIK OS X has two parts:
> 1. FreeBSD
> 2. Proprietary GUI
> 
> They took the FreeBSD but put a proprietary GUI on top of it.

So?  The claim made (and quoted above) was that a proprietary product could 
only be temporary "unless you manage to kill the community aroudn your 
open-source competitor".  This clearly isn't true -- OS X attracts many 
customers due to that proprietary GUI, and it's not necessary to kill the 
community around the "competitor" (FreeBSD) that they drew on to create the 
overall product.

Would it be very successfuly without the proprietary GUI?  Of course not.  
The point was it was possible to add proprietary extensions (the GUI) and 
have it stand on its own, unthreatened by the original openp-source code.

Deven