Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 09:30:47 -0700 From: Don Wilde <DonWilde@safezonesys.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: 2B is going 2Bcome irrelevant Message-ID: <D3E574636090D211B0B000A0C906924565CB@MACALEESENT>
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Thought you all'd enjoy this. Reference the Editorial by Jonathan Erickson of Doctor Dobb's Journal, January '99 issue pg. 8, probably also on their ddj.com website. The OpEd discusses the implications and slanting of the proposed Uniform Commercial Code Article 2B, which is designed to bless the 'you open it, you agree' payware licenses and all their legalistic theft. Dear Jonathan - I appreciated your editorial pointing out the questionable worth of the new UCC Article 2B. Your worry is well founded, but I'd like to point out a growing counter-force to the payware dinosaurs and their legions of lawyers. I have eliminated most of my payware-licensed programs and use only freely-distributable open source programs like FreeBSD and XFree86. Now that people are reverse engineering Micros**t's proprietary data formats such as Word6 .DOC and Excel5 .XLS, I no longer need those monstrosities. We small furry mammals may occasionally be squashed by the behemoths, but we're breeding like you-know-what, and now we're starting to get corporate and media recognition. I realize that your audience is mostly professional software engineers paid to create software -- I am one -- but we all know that open source (by virtue of its open inspection by the internet community) is far more robust than most payware. Most of us are forced by Windows-centric managers to use Windows-based tools, or -- worse! -- pirated copies of such. It is true that there is a broader base of desktop and specialty packages available for NT and W9x -- now -- but that is changing as the perceptual sea-change sweeps the commercial marketplace. It doesn't take many defections from the Microsoft-oriented community to create a massive multiplication of our freeware developer resources. Even if only one percent of the Windows people switch, and one percent of those contribute to the FreeBSD source base, that's still a tripling (at least!) of our developer community. We already have a robust, commercial-grade operating system, and all of the internet-developed programs out there have been ported in complete packages to FreeBSD and are available on the distribution disks. This includes all the tools that NASA and the National Labs used in the 70's and 80's on their early Sun workstations to develop all their esoteric toys, and today's commodity PC's are so much more powerful than Sun 3's that we can take it so much farther. FreeBSD PC's are not PC's any more. We shouldn't compare them to Windoze word processors and spreadsheet calculators. They are inexpensive and powerful personal graphics workstations, complete with networking, mail services and web-in-a-box, and they scare the bejesus out of Bill Gates because he then becomes an irrelevance. We are more of a threat to him than Scott McNealy or Ray Noorda ever will be. We people have more sense than either Wall Street or Washington give us credit for. 2B will only accelerate the acceptance and further development of open source software. Don Wilde donwilde@safezonesys.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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