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Date:      Mon, 20 Mar 2000 21:18:49 -0800
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk>
Cc:        Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Jay Nelson <noslenj@swbell.net>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: The Merger, and what will its effects be on committers?
Message-ID:  <20000320211849.B522@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <38D637E0.B9ABBBBB@originative.co.uk>; from paul@originative.co.uk on Mon, Mar 20, 2000 at 02:38:24PM %2B0000
References:  <200003171545.IAA16366@usr06.primenet.com> <xzpityif484.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <38D637E0.B9ABBBBB@originative.co.uk>

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On Monday, 20 March 2000 at 14:38:24 +0000, Paul Richards wrote:
> Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote:
>>
>> Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> writes:
>>> The point is that, if a driver already exists in BSDI, and FreeBSD
>>> becomes the public shadow of the BSDI source tree, there is very
>>> little incentive to write a new driver among volunteers, because
>>> the job has already been done, and there are interesting things to
>>> write that haven't yet been done.
>>
>> Why would FreeBSD become the public shadow of the BSDI source tree?
>> From what I've read about the merger, the reverse (BSDI becoming the
>> commercial shadow of FreeBSD) is more likely.
>>
>> Let me spell it out for you: BSDI WILL NOT CONTROL FREEBSD.
>>
>> Nobody can take arbitrary control of FreeBSD. It's open source. Even
>> if Jordan, David & co. were to "sell out" to BSDI today, they couldn't
>> stop committers from finding another place to host the project and
>> carry on with its development. The worst they can do is stop us from
>> using the name.
>
> Umm, that's more than a little ridiculous.
>
> Nobody can stop anyone taking the codebase and lauching another project.
> If "Jordan, David & co" stop you using the name then what you're doing
> is setting up a competing project not taking the project somewhere else.

I think this is a matter of definition.  Do you consider the project
to be the name, or the product?  Recall that we have already gone
through a number of names: UNIX, Berkeley UNIX, BSD UNIX, BSD,
FreeBSD.  There's a continuity of product from one to the next.  Sure,
I wouldn't want to drop the BSD name, but then I wasn't too happy when
we had to drop the UNIX name, either.  But we survived.

Greg
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