Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 21:19:37 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: davidw@master.debian.org (David Welton) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, grog@lemis.com, FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NetBSD/Linux 'distribution' Message-ID: <199902202119.OAA17160@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990220143410.B16910@debian.org> from "David Welton" at Feb 20, 99 02:34:10 pm
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> > It's free software. They can do anything they want with it, except > > change the license or claim they invented it while talking about > > features that came from someone else's sweat and blood. > > The distribution would hypothetically be named Debian GNU/FreeBSD or > something like that, and we would obviously give back anything good we > happened to create. Call it "Yewnicks", if you want. > > If they want to do it, I say let them. I'm betting they just grab a > > kernel, and the hardware support was why they approached NetBSD. > > This "let them" is kind of what I was curious about - we wouldn't > really want to do anything like this without at least a neutral > reaction from whichever group's work we used. It would be a waste of > our time if we were openly in conflict with the group.. Don't take "let them" as an antonym for "prevent them". The license prevents us from preventing you. That's on purpose. The BSD license is about "raising the bar", without playing "keep away". If you get flack for rebadging the code, then you are getting flack from people who just don't "get it". Let us know, so that we may educate them. If Microsoft wanted to take all of FreeBSD and rebadge it as a Microsoft product, we would be *very happy* (or most of us would, anyway). If Oracle wanted to take all of FreeBSD and NetBSD and rebadge it as NC/Server and NC/Client, we'd also be *very happy* (they already did this). The point is to make *good technology* that people *use*, and not really give a damn about what people do with it afterwards. It doesn't matter what they do afterwards; what matters is how high are the lowest shoulder we, or someone else, can stand on tomorrow. A friend of mine and I were talking about the Internet the other day, and the death of Jon Postel. We were mostly concerned that his death might have been a bell tolling for the end of an era. What we concluded is that he and the others involved built one hell of a two lane road for the future, and that they graded the ground for another two lanes, and piled most of the paving materials (IPV6, SVRLOC, DHC, etc.) on the side. BSD is a paving material. If I decide at some point in the future that I want to "do a startup", you can be guaranteed that it will be to my distinct advantage to build it next to the road. Maybe it'll even be a part of the road that I helped pave. If I don't, and someone else takes the work and build something, well, I still benefit from there having been roads. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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