Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:58:00 +0200 From: Eivind Eklund <eivind@FreeBSD.org> To: j mckitrick <jcm@freebsd-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: BSD, .Net comments - any reponse to this reasoning? Message-ID: <20010710175800.A77023@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <20010710151059.A52201@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>; from jcm@freebsd-uk.eu.org on Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 03:10:59PM %2B0100 References: <20010630174743.A85268@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <20010707160255.A18525@thinksec.no> <20010710151059.A52201@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 03:10:59PM +0100, j mckitrick wrote: > | More emotionally laden nonsense. There are a bunch of reasons to contribute > | changes back to the open source projects: > | (1) You get much less integration work when you want to utilize newer version > | of the open source project. Basically, the changes you have now made > | maintain themselves WRT the open source project for free, rather than > | needing more care. > > That's one I never thought of or hear stated in that way. Weird. It's more or less the canonical argument for why contribute back to BSD-licensed projects. We obviously need a FAQ or good paper about this. > | > Just because a thing like apache did not get seriously forked is no > | > indication that it cannot ever happen. Why take risk? Why use the > | > economical lever, when the legal lever is much more direct and more powerful > | > in this case? > | > | Because we see benefits in properitary extensions. When somebody use our > | codebase in a proprietary environment, they are working on the codebase. This > | means they likely will be producing beneficial changes to the codebase. These > | changes come in two forms - strategic changes, that are sellable and part of > | added value, and tactical changes, that have value as levers for creating the > | strategic changes, but no intrisic competitive advantage. The latter usually > | are more plentiful than the former, and have larger value when given back to > | the community (buying goodwill) than when kept proprietary (costing money to > | maintain). > > Could you give an example of these 'levers' ? A few examples (tilted in favour of work I've done and contributed back, because that's what's easiest to remember): - netgraph, developed by Whistle and contributed to FreeBSD. This was viewed as strategic for a while, but when the Interjet was developed enough, it was degraded to being viewed as tactical and reasonable to contribute back. - The CAM code in FreeBSD, developed by Plutotech for their embedded video editing system and contributed back. This is the present basis for the FreeBSD SCSI subsystem. - The original PnP support for the ed driver, developed by Yours Truly for Yes interactive and donated back to FreeBSD. This also contained a simple but significant bug (one line difference) that was found by Bruce Evans after it was contributed back (thus demonstrating the point of getting multiple experts to look at it) - Support in i4b (the FreeBSD ISDN code) for using userland PPP. Developed by Yours Truly for Yes Interactive and contributed back. My work on i4b also avoided the reproduction of a significant bug that used to be present in bisdn (the predecessor to i4b) in i4b. This was a bug I found when making bisdn work for userland PPP, and which had blocked the tty driver there from working properly (instead giving sporadic crashes) through all releases of bisdn, and which I would not have found if I hadn't worked on that code for proprietary use (a week of debugging.) - Support in libalias (the backing library for ppp -nat and natd) for punching minimal holes in an ipfw firewall for active protocols (ftp, irc dcc). Developed by me for Yes Interactive, and contributed back. - A lot of the VM system work done by John Dyson for FreeBSD was sponsored by Network Computers (a subsidary of Oracle) because they needed a better VM system for the servers they used for the NCs. And that's just a sample. Eivind. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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