Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 02:37:51 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: abelits@genesyslab.com (Alex Belits) Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, dshanes@personalogic.com, brett@lariat.org, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Your Article "Freeware: The Heart & Soul of the Internet" Message-ID: <199804100237.TAA22946@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.95.980409180750.2504G-100000@es1840.genesyslab.com> from "Alex Belits" at Apr 9, 98 06:37:00 pm
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> > I was told by Eric Raymond (whom I met briefly at the Mozilla party) > > that the *BSD people were deliberately excluded because there were too > > many BSDs and they didn't want to get involved in any political issues > > over it. I find these continuous allegations of the BSD world being > > gratuitously and needlessly "split" (even though each *BSD seeks to > > fill a different niche) by the Linux community to be rather tiresome > > considering the amount of division in their own ranks and can only see > > this as something of a double standard, but I've long since given up > > on any hope of fair play from this particular crowd. > > While Eric Raymond may know better, I suspect that they were afraid of > being involved in political issues over *BSD _vs._ Linux. That looks way, > way more realistic, evan though still insulting. There are certainly some politics involved. Larry McVoy and Eric Raymond are examples of people who distribute their own software under GPL, and have a vested interest in promoting GPL over other licensing terms (though if you go look at http://www.opensource.org for the Open Source Software page, you will see that they state that the BSD license meets the necessary criteria for labelling). One real problem is that there are axes, other than the Open Source Software axe, that are being ground. Eric attributes much favor to the GPL in his "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" paper (written about his "fetchmail" program), and Larry disdains the BSD license for historical reasons (Larry was chief scientist at Sun when they killed SunOS off in favor of Solaris, and wouldn't let the SunOS code out). The division in Linux implementations is very real. I have been hand-holding someone through getting LDAP up on a Linux box, and other than the obvious configuration problems (mostly brought on by GDBM not working like the Berkeley LDBM), there are a number of problems that a purely distribution-centric. Specifically, the RedHat Linux 5.0 distribution implements sys_errlist[] more like BSD, and that makes it impossible to make an LDAP server that will compile both on RedHat 5.0 *and* other Linux implementations at the same time (some need the manifest platform falg SYSERRLIST_IN_STDIO and some *must not* have it). *BSD has a fragmented image problem because there isn't one kernel; but having one kernel hasn't saved Linux from fragmentation problems, like the one listed above (which is one of a class, not just a signle instance that isn't repeated). Spinning market perception is harder than pointing to conclusive technical information. > > This and several other incidents of a similar nature has pretty much > > convinced me that this crowd would rather prefer it if we really > > didn't exist at all and is going to essentially conduct their > > operations as if we didn't. Oh well. Perhaps it *IS* time to go on > > the PR offensive here ("Why Linux doesn't work") since playing nice > > guys hasn't appeared to have won us anything but lots of nice comments > > from folks like Marc A. at netscape to the effect that "Linux is the > > only free OS alternative." I'm getting tired of that, and if it's > > going to take "breaking ranks" with the rest of the free OS community > > to get our own message out, maybe it's time. > > Please, before doing that try to make a list of goals that it is > supposed to accomplish. I have to admit that I was a bit ticked off by one press release that stated "Linux is the freely available UNIX implementation", using "the" instead of "a". The was SunWorld Online (I believe) quoting Netscape higher-ups over the Mozilla release. I don't think that "attack ads" will do much but alienate people, but on the other hand, I would definitely like to avoid BSD ending up a second-class invisible. Netscape making Linux a reference platform, but not BSD, is rather much to take with grace and no visible indignation. What is the status on the CVS/CVSup Mozilla source repository that was being considered? That would certainly raise visibility in a positive way, even if the involvement was only in providing the technology to Netscape. You could still press-release it... If nothing else, BSD *needs* to have a Mozilla repository, if BSD is *not* a reference platform. Certainly "FreeBSD Mirrors Mozilla Sources Internationally" would be a good headline for a press release as well... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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