Re: [LI] Message from RMS.

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 04:31:59PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>         No. I am implying that lots of commercial companies merely
>  ripped off the BSD fee work (Sun, Digital, Data General), branded it,
>  and no benefit accrued to the community from these advances.
> 

But it didn't hurt any of the developers in any way. They were just
as free. Empire building was not their goal.

>         Under the GPL, there is a possibility that would not have been
>  the case. It is my considered opinion that had the *BSD's been under
>  the GPL, it would have been the *BSD's that were leading the free
>  *NIX movement, not the johnny come lately Linux.

If you take the example of Sun, they reimplemented everything under
SVR4 with AT&T. If *BSDs were GPL'ed, they would've rewritten it while 
throwing out all the code. This is what I call forced conversion. If
Sun doesn't want to release code, let them keep it.

> 
>  Arun> (b) Sure, certain people in the BSD camp were elitist and didn't think 
>  Arun>     that computers can be used by ordinary people. That was
>  Arun>     their undoing.  But that has nothing to do with the BSD
>  Arun>     license.
> 
>         Actually, this is a bit of an understatement. I tried *BSD
>  communities before I migrated to the then technically inferior Linux;
>  and I have little reason to believe there has been much of a
>  change. Just ask Theo ;-)

I don't know any of the (Free)BSD developers personally - but I like their
organization - what appears to be merit based core team structure, 
as opposed to dictatorships.

	-Arun