Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 14:28:22 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003221411070.691-100000@theory8.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <200003212351.QAA13462@usr08.primenet.com>
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> I think that if a professional software company were to do a > formal code review on "fetchmail", the case-study basis for > Raymond's paper, and publish the results, the entire Open Source > movement might very well falter as "an obviously bad idea, in > retrospect". The press is already starting to back up on the > idea of Linux (right or wrong); see: > > <http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2470425,00.html>; That article isn't really backing up on the idea of Linux being high-quality: it worries about fragmentation among distributions, and "what happens if Linus gets hit by a truck" -- ie a possible fork in the kernel itself. For the first question, the article itself talks about the proposed linux standard base, and for the second, I don't think any linuxers are worried: already Alan Cox has as much respect as Linus himself, and there are others down the line, so a code fork would look very unlikely even if Linus did get hit by a truck. On the whole the article looked pretty positive to me -- I've seen much worse, anyway. > I think litigation is only going to be an issue when Open Source > becomes more than a paper-dragon threat to commercial enterprises; It's good to note that you say "when" rather than "if". The growth of linux in mindshare is pretty phenomenal, I increasingly see ordinary people curious about it. Moreover, the open-source people are widely seen as the "good guys", no longer confused with the media image of "hackers" as vandals. BSD is not so well known but it doesn't have to be: once the open source alternative gets accepted, people will start getting to know BSD too. I suspect that litigation on patent infringements, even if legally possible, will become rather hard by that time, for PR reasons. As one article some time back put it, it would be like suing Santa Claus. In any case, to protect the movement (and the industry as a whole) those open-source people who are beginning to get into influential positions in software companies should start lobbying for reforms on software patents. Now is really the time, with the statements by Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos on the Amazon patents, and Bezos himself calling for reforms. I'm sure if heavyweights like IBM and HP can be persuaded to push for it it will be done. On that subject, here is a question I've often wondered about: the FreeBSD distribution comes with the Unix compress command included. Doesn't this infringe the Unisys patent on LZW? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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