Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 16:16:01 -0900 From: Brian Raynes <brian_raynes@dnr.state.ak.us> To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>, freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Prevalence of FreeBSD and UNIX among servers Message-ID: <3C0D7551.3D84A4A6@dnr.state.ak.us> References: <00ef01c17cda$6b419760$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D0426.BEC515D7@dnr.state.ak.us> <010001c17cf4$954228d0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D21CD.7F89C40A@dnr.state.ak.us> <013b01c17d10$cf9c99e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0D591E.D33C5BD5@dnr.state.ak.us> <018701c17d25$16c389a0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski wrote: > > Brian writes: > > > Redhat, and for that matter Mandrake, have > > contributed loads of time, money and programmer > > effort into much of the free software structure > > on top of Linux. > > I'm sure that Microsoft and Adobe burned the midnight oil, too, when they were young and still trying to dig a gold mine. > > In any case, they aren't helping FreeBSD much, are they? Microsoft and Adobe had some free (as in beer) products in order to grab market share. For what it's worth, I think Adobe's way of doing it was very good for most computer uses - I really like pdf format and everyone can read them with free readers. There are also free (as in "freedom") software implementations for creating pdfs, so I see little harm there, either. Redhat and Mandrake have released their free software under the GPL, which prevents the BSDs from using a lot of it. It's true that RPM and their respective install utilities are of small interest to FreeBSD. > > Redhat and Mandrake put most of their early > > work under the GPL. > > Early work, eh? And now? And now I don't follow what Redhat is doing anymore. Mandrake still releases software developed there as GPL. They both offer proprietary software in package deals on top of the free software. But I have used both for useful work without any proprietary, closed-source software and the free additions that they have both made were definitely of benefit to me in using Linux. Judge that how you will. > > Redhat acquired some companies doing proprietary > > development, but much of their stuff is still > > released under the GPL, as far as I know. > > Uh-huh. > > However, once these companies finally make it clear that they are really in it for the money, maybe FreeBSD will become more > popular, at least until someone tries to turn it into a cash cow as well. > > > It just seems that most of it is of little > > interest to others. > > One of the rules is to only give away software that nobody wants to buy. That way you can say you are supporting open source > without actually sacrificing any money. As I pointed out before, they made huge, undernoticed and underappreciated contributions to GNOME, which lots of people like, even if I like it less than the competitor (KDE). Oh yeah, and those two environments are usable on FreeBSD and other unix-like OSes. > > And free software has been around as long as > > software has ... > > But how much free software from the past is still available--and free--today? All of the GNU software I've ever heard of, although some of the original stuff may have little utility on today's hardware? The BSD tools and operating system go back a long way too. The principal to remember with both these examples is that even if someone makes a paid product from the code or portions of it, the stuff that they borrowed (stole?) is still there for the free software people to use. It doesn't go away just because someone copies it. That seems obvious, but gets overlooked often. > > > Not everyone codes for any reason other than to > > fill their own needs, after that, they may not > > care if they make a dime off of it and give it > > away to whomever might find that they have similar > > needs. I think that principle will keep free > > software alive for a long time. > > I hope so. It's nice to not have to work for a living, that's for sure, but it isn't a common luxury. Most of these guys do work for a living. I'm not sure where or if they have much of a social life, though:) I think a lot of them drop off the free software scene when a real life catches up with them, but then there's always a new batch of young, single people looking to work on something interesting to take over. It's true that most of us can't be Alan Cox or Theo (of OpenBSD) and live off our computer hobby without an outside employer dictating to us. Bummer. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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