Re: licensing

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Jeff Kinz wrote:

> Jeremy - Please only send your replies directly to the list.  Don't cc
> me or email it directly to me.

Okay. (Please note that most lists allow users to define their own
Reply-To in their original headers to encourage where you want replies to
go to.)

> Quot: " Market share for the Linux operating system surged by 212 percent in
> 1998, a growth rate that outpaced Windows NT, NetWare, Unix, and all
> others in the server market, according to a new study."

Thank you for the links and information about market share. I will have a
look at them. (I understand that a lot of research and surveys are funded
or have other bias; for example, it is possible the research didn't
include any some operating systems in the questions or didn't include some
results in the their published findings.)

> If NetBSD has been ported to it then Linux is there as well. All 55
> times.  You're a journalist Jeremy, if you really want a list of all the
> hardware Linux has been ported to, do the research and publish it
> yourself.  (Hint ==> http://www.tldp.org/ )

All 55 times?

The first thing that came to my mind is Vax. Of course, it is old and
out-of-date, but NetBSD has more Vax supported and fewer bugs.

Also, it is important to note, that many of these esoteric ports for Linux
may not be officially maintained or included by Linus (or his official
kernel maintainers). They are often a variety of patches. (Also should
mention that glibc is seperate and may need patches too.)

NetBSD supports with a kernel, libc and base operating system (and in most
cases, XFree86) on the many hardware ports.

(Of course, there are other BSD kernels going back over 20 years which are
used in various locations.)

Thank you for the links and references to hardware devices running Linux.
I did notice that some of the items you included were not support by BSD.
Nevertheless, several items which you counted multiple times are supported
by NetBSD (by a "single" NetBSD port).

I will continue to do some research. I am working on a webpage now. This
is interesting, but this discussion doesn't need to continue on this list.

> So HP, IBM, SUN, SCO (Bleaagh!), Dell  - examples of commercial
> companies that support Linux and not BSD. (AFAIK)

"Support" and "BSD" are too vague. HP, IBM, SUN, and SCO all provide
products based on BSD-licensed code. And those four provide products
based on code originating for Berkeley Software Distributions. (One of
SCO's recent examples of code stealing was actually "BSD" code.)

Even the Linux kernel contains BSD-licensed code and code from the UCB.

As for Linux distributions, a wide variety of essential software is
BSD-licensed and/or BSD-based, such as Vixie Cron, BIND, parts of
util-linux, flex, Linux-PAM, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, lilo, shadow suite (login,
passwd, id, su, et cetera), lpr/lpd, mailx, netkit-inetd, netkit-ping,
nvi, sudo, telnet, traceroute, parts of glibc, and many more.

These companies may not support official BSD operating systems, but in
many cases they do rely on or support BSD code and BSD-licensed code.

> Your actually including Microsoft as an example of the "Goodness" of the
> BSD license?  Wow.

Yes.

Now getting back to the real discussion ...

> Um - Ok, but the issue being discussed is what License would be better
> to use for south Africa Gov't - GPL or BSD ?

Including Microsoft is a great example of knowing how to choose a license.

What are the goals for this software developed for the South Africa
government?

I believe there is nothing wrong with code paid for by tax-payers to be
reused in proprietary products. Many people can benefit.

Does the government want to restrict commercial, proprietary reuse of the
code?

I believe that governments should develop software and release using an
open source license that allows proprietary use. It is possible that
companies and organizations in their country can benefit financially (and
provide more employment) by allowing code to have value.

Sleepy Cat is a good example of a BSD-based product that is GPL-style
licensed. (It is said to be the mostly widely used database code.) They
publicly stated that they use the license to stop competition. Would a
government really have the same goal?

Also, does the government really care or want to force all released
changes to be given back to the government?

Does a government care if a company takes their code and extends it and
makes money off of it? (Probably, money and jobs that are put back in the
community.)

Also, thank you for the link to your slides. I'll look at them soon.

The discussion about the Linux and BSD ports and usage doesn't need to
continue and is probably off-topic for this list and discussion.

I do look forward to replies and comments about choosing licensing for use
by governments.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.isp-faq.com/

p.s. I am not pro-Microsoft nor anti-Microsoft. I am not pro-proprietary
software. My office and all my work uses open source software. I know and
understand the benefits of "open" source. The software that works best
(which includes security) will win in the long run. Also I am not entirely
anti-GPL: I am a developer and maintainer of a GPL'd project. I am
definitely not anti-Linux: My company has been developing a Linux
distribution for the past 13 months.