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

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
[...]
> > 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.

The OS X example is very ill chosen because it proves strictly nothing:
 * they have not been using the FreeBSD code long enough to prove that
this enables them to have a viable business (unlike Brett said).
 * their revenue primarily comes from their hardware sales and not from
any potential sales of OS X they may make.
 * the fact that they are using FreeBSD is irrelevant since their
advantage is not there but in the proprietary GUI that they are using.
 * since their advantage is in their proprietary GUI they could just as
well have built it on top of the Linux kernel. So this does not prove
any superiority of the BSD license over the GPL.
 * similarly, they don't need to kill their open-source competitor since
it is not a competitor in the first place.


> 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.

Exactly the same way one can built a proprietary GUI on top of the Linux
kernel. You are not proving anything.


--
Francois Gouget         [email protected]        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  In a world without fences who needs Gates?