On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:25:58 +0000, Ed Jensen wrote: > Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Python and *BSD are getting far less volunteer development love than, >> say, GCC or Linux, and the licensing is at least part of the reason. > > I disagree. I believe *BSD gets less volunteer development because of > some legal wrangling in the early 90s that didn't affect Linux.
That was over a decade ago, and the BSD licence was vindicated by the courts -- why has there been such limited volunteer development, and practically zero commercial development, for BSD? The BSDs are about 15 years older than Linux, and the legal wrangling they went through were no worse than the SCO nonsense going on now. With a 15 year head start, and 10 years since the legal problems, why has BSD never attracted 1% the commercial interest of Linux? You can often tell something of a thing by those who oppose it. Microsoft is perhaps the epitome of the closed-source mentality: on the rare occasions they release their source code at all, they do so only grudgingly, never the entire tool chain, at very high cost, and with exceedingly restrictive conditions. (Yes, I'm aware I'm generalising -- but it is a valid generalisation, one or two minor exceptions doesn't invalidate the overall picture of Microsoft's desire to keep their source code locked up tight.) Microsoft is spending a lot of time and effort trying to fight the GPL, but have said that BSD licences are acceptable to them. In fact they *love* BSD licences -- for others, just not for themselves. And no wonder: Windows only has an TCP/IP stack because they could grab the BSD source code and use it. Has Microsoft show any gratitude to the BSDs? Have they returned any code to BSDs, or given money to BSD coders? In a pig's ear they have. Microsoft stands for closed source software: they absolutely hate the GPL. But they like the BSD licence, because it lets them freeload off the labour of idealistic programmers for free, without so much as a thank you. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
