Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 14:28:19 -0700 From: "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> To: "Brett Glass" <brett@lariat.org> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD and memetics Message-ID: <000101be8d07$0ae09350$021d85d1@whenever.youwant.to> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.32.19990422144951.00c60f00@localhost>
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> If you have not seen this, then you may not have taken the time to > become adequately informed about the marketing and positioning of > FreeBSD (what little is currently done). The slogan "The Power To Serve" > appears on the FreeBSD Web site and on many of the proomotional > materials. Representatives of the FreeBSD project and of Walnut > Creek CD-ROM actively steer desktop users and software developers > (ALL software developers, even if they develop server software) to > Linux. Let's face it, FreeBSD shines as a server and pales in comparison to NT as a desktop OS. You'd have to be pretty blind not to see that. If you had two machines, one to do all your server-type stuff and one to do all your desktop-type stuff, what OS would you run on each? Be honest. That's not to say that FreeBSD shouldn't go in the direction of being a stronger desktop OS. But as far as server OS goes, it's already there. > >Jordan just summed it up in his > >message to Licia: He writes software for himself, and you're > welcome to use it > >if you want, but if you don't want to, that's fine. > > An attitude that's fine for the occasional hacker, but > inappropriate for the > leader of a product development team. Exactly. And that's true whether the product is commercial or not. > >Incidentally, I believe that *commercial* developers will be willing to > >support free software only under the GPL. > > This is wrongheaded and in fact the opposite of what will actually > happen if developers are properly educated (something which should > happen as a result of the proper promotion of FreeBSD). Most > commercial developers > would not support GPLed software if they knew its intent: to put > them out of > business. Those that are supporting Linux are naive and/or just > stupidly hopping > the bandwagon. Actually, in my experience, commercial developers won't go anywhere near the GPL, because it's way to restrictive. Even the BSD license is too restrictive. Commercial developers need to be able to cut and paste code at will, without having to put disclaimers and notices in their manuals. If you want commercial developers to contribute to your code significantly, it really has to be free and unrestricted. Being a commercial developer, I can give you a very good example that occured just recently. One of the products whose development I manage needed a fast, light database. We looked at Gdbm, but we can't go distributing source code and putting notices in our manual. We looked at commercial stuff, and most of it is too slow and heavy, not available on all the platforms we need, or not available royalty-free. So we're going to develop our own. It will be pretty much a gdbm clone with a few extra features (multiple keys, non-unique keys, support for GUID-labelling). Had gdbm been really free, we'd have used it. And we'd happily have released the extra features back to the open source community -- the publicity would have benefitted us and others might have caught bugs that we would miss or enhanced our code for us in other ways. So now everybody loses. We have more work to do, increasing the cost of our software. The open source community loses the code we could have contributed. The quality of our code will probably be lower than it could have been. In my experience, this is _typical_ of open source's affect on the commercial development community. DS To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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