Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 03:01:01 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com> To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@wasabisystems.com> Cc: freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Competition Message-ID: <444.966852061@localhost> In-Reply-To: Your message of "20 Aug 2000 18:52:31 EDT." <87d7j3lf4g.fsf@snark.piermont.com>
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> You mean "The NetBSD code base is easy enough to copy and call our > own. Why don't we just do it. Surely they aren't going to complain -- > after all, it is all open source. It worked for Alpha, after all." Heh. This is a historically "interesting" perspective and suggests that personal bias may have overpowered the reality of actual events for someone. :-) I've certainly never heard anyone refer to the Alpha code as "our own", from either a personal or a FreeBSD project perspective, and I would openly challenge you to find any such assertions on a FreeBSD mailing list. I can nonetheless save you the trouble of looking because they don't exist. I believe the only person who could credibly claim the Alpha bits as "his own" in any sense would be Chris Demetriou, and I've never heard that fact openly disputed by anyone in the BSD community. That's his copyright plainly at the top of alpha/alpha/cpuconf.c and we all remember his work at CMU as well. To be more factual than emotional about this point in general, I don't think the FreeBSD community feels a great deal of ownership for the *overwhelming majority* of FreeBDS code base given that we're not the authors of 4.4 BSD or the GPL toolchain used to build it, we're merely some of the latest custodians. Hell, anyone who's not on crack clearly feels that way given that it's a fundamental truth we've lived with since the project started. It's also the case that none of us would (or should) be putting code into the open source domain in the first place if we didn't WANT it to be used by any and all takers, and anyone in the NetBSD community who felt that code was "stolen" in some way for the FreeBSD/alpha port would be missing the entire idea behind this common exercise we're all engaged in. What sits in our mutual CVS repositories is not "our" code or "your" code by any meaningful definition since both FreeBSD and NetBSD represent hugely inter-dependent collections of code provided by everyone from the FSF to Hewlett-Packard. The alpha port, for example, would be little more than a comparatively useless academic exercise in running *BSD on the Alpha were it not for gcc and the work of hundreds of other individuals who've all provided vital pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which make up a usable operating system on any architecture. To claim ownership (to the degree that anything can be "taken" or "stolen") over an entire port of the BSD operating system is simply claiming too much from an engineering perspective and misses the concept of open source development besides. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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