Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 02:46:03 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: "FreeBSD Advocacy" <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD and Microsoft Message-ID: <001b01c0ffb7$2525b4a0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010628111710.E9802@lpt.ens.fr>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Rahul >Siddharthan > >Are you suggesting that Microsoft plans in the long term to roll its >own pretty-face products based on FreeBSD (or other open-source Unix), >like Apple is doing? Do you have any evidence for that suggestion? > I am not suggesting that they are planning right now to do this, I don't know anyone at Microsoft. However, I'm stating that when they start down the Open Source cooperation path that eventually they won't have a choice. There's a very strong suggestion of this in that interview at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2001/06/27/dotnet.html I'll point out these statements from that interview: "...FreeBSD has traditionally been an operating system that encouraged unencumbered experimentation. ... And that's what we're using it for. We're using it to prove the point that you can actually implement the CLI on Unix. It's been around a long time, people use it commercially. Microsoft uses it commercially, actually...." In case you missed it he just said that Microsoft uses FreeBSD commercially. "it" in this context refers to FreeBSD, not CLI. "Also, there are high performance memory managers, garbage collectors and compilers that are in the commercial version, but not in the shared source version. "That's something that we want to charge for."" Now, consider that according to this Microsoft is planning on releasing an Open Source version of CLI that's restricted to "non-commercial" use, on FreeBSD. Suppose that a customer goes and gets the free Shared Source version of this and starts experimenting with it - 6 months later they have built an entire working system with it on FreeBSD that uses CLI in part of it and that they are satisfied with. But, they want to scale it up and to do so they are going to need to increase it's performance. So they go back to Microsoft and ask about the "High Performance" commercial version of CLI. Now, imagine what would happen if Microsoft tells them "Sorry, you have to scrap most of the system and reimplement your CLI-based system on Windows" Kiss that sale goodbye. >Incidentally, recent moves by Caldera seem to suggest that per-seat >licensing of a "prettified" distribution is not incompatible with >linux either. This week's lwn.net editorial takes a surprisingly >positive stance on this. It never has been incompatible. Nothing in the GPL prevents people from charging for the source - but they must make any source touched by GPL available for free. Obviously when you do this you can't charge much for it. In Caldera's case they most likely haven't released all their "prettified" code under GPL, thus they don't have to redistribute that, and thus they can charge higher prices for the distribution that includes the pretty code. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com > >- R > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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