Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 17:58:16 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: djohnson@acuson.com (David Johnson) Cc: jhb@FreeBSD.ORG (John Baldwin), freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Windriver, Slackware and FreeBSD Message-ID: <200104181758.KAA17199@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <3ADDD05A.9F2BB640@acuson.com> from "David Johnson" at Apr 18, 2001 10:35:22 AM
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> But they do not need to buy BSDi in order to use FreeBSD. From my layman > reading of the BSD license, you are not required to buy any company in > order to use, distribute, modify or profit from FreeBSD. On the other > hand, buying BSDi gives you rights to BSD/OS, which is not under the BSD > license. > > WindRiver spent a lot of words talking about why the BSD license allows > them to use FreeBSD, but extremely few words on what that had to do with > them buying BSDi. Did you listen in on the conference call? The only thing that was troubling to me was that, on the conference call, Jordan once again defended not releasing the FreeBSD trademark to the FreeBSD Foundation. The defense was that there was legal muscle required to be able to defend the trademark (and this was the same excuse given for the non-transfer by Walnut Creek CDROM, and again for the non-transfer by BSDI). In its almost 10 year history, there has not been one incident of the trademark being defended or needing defense against misuse. In addition, nothing prevents donation of legal services for defense, should the need arise, and, in fact, such donations, made to a 503C tax-exempt charity, like the FreeBSD Foundation, would be tax dedutible for the company(s) or individual(s) donating them. Buying BSDI did give them control of the FreeBSD trademark; this isn't to say that they will abuse this control in order to keep FreeBSD from impinging on their embedded systems market (a place where FreeBSD is more and more frequently used to push past startup costs, and to get around OS inflexibilty that comes with "one size fits all" binary only distributions). If it came down to it, the FreeBSD project could survive much better than Linux, in a similar situation, since so many of us have full copies of the historical source repository, back to day one, but it's possible that we would not be able to call the resulting software "FreeBSD". 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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