Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 13:09:48 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> Cc: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Kris Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9905051247520.16397-100000@theory6.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <372F83BC.597F33F7@newsguy.com>
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> nowadays). Would you mind filling in who are making money by selling > _their own_ software GPLed? This really seems way off-topic, which is why I've been keeping quiet. But since you ask: Cygnus contributes heavily to a lot of GNU software. In particular, they coordinate development of egcs, which Stallman has now blessed as the "official" gcc. They sell an enhanced platform called GNUPro, but nearly all of it is GPL'd, and all the GPL'd stuff is eventually publicly released. Red Hat GPL's just about everything they write, such their install program, the package manager (which is now used by nearly everyone else), various configuration programs, etc. They have also funded the GNOME project quite heavily, and employ several linux developers (including Alan Cox) to write linux and related code, all of which is GPL'd. They have even ceased support of non-free stuff like CDE and Applixware, which they used to support earlier. Long back, Peter Deutsch had this interesting idea of GPL'ing old versions of ghostscript, while using two different licences (free but very restrictive, or commercial) for the latest version, and he claims to have made enough money to retire on, while keeping the GNU camp (mostly) happy too. Maybe this is not so off-topic after all. How many people are paid to work on FreeBSD? In the linux world, perhaps the closest analogy to the FreeBSD team may be Debian, but they're not the reason linux is such a hit over the last year. The reason is the commercial companies, and the single biggest factor may be Red Hat, which has made its name among the big corporations, and at the same time remained in the good books of the linux community by contributing back heavily. I'm not saying they did this because of the GPL. They didn't have to GPL their package manager, for instance, but they did. I see no hitch in a commercial company selling FreeBSD under the BSDL. I suspect a commercial company like BSDI would have done much better, very likely beaten Red Hat to the big time, if they had stuck to the BSDL for their distributions and concentrated on the ``support'' market (which includes selling prepackaged CDs and manuals, as Red Hat does) for making money. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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