Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 04:06:04 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Hiten Pandya <hitmaster2k@yahoo.com> Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [OT] RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD Message-ID: <3C17482C.3792DAA9@mindspring.com> References: <20011212105559.19177.qmail@web21103.mail.yahoo.com>
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Hiten Pandya wrote: > why would RMS sue, lets say me, for porting IBM's > piece of GPL'ed code to FreeBSD src/gnu. RMS wouldn't, not being directly involved. IBM might. I am a former IBM employee, of IBM GSB division (Global Small Business). I became an IBM employee when IBM bought Whistle Communications, Inc., which produced a SOHO connectivity product called the InterJet. This became the basis of the IBM Web Connections offering (the purchase of Whistle was portrayed as a time-to-market decision). The InterJet II product is what funded the Soft Updates port to FreeBSD. The idea was to get rid of the internal UPS that was otherwise required, to reduce the COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold). With Soft Updates, we were able to replace the UPS with a power supply with a large DC holdup time, and AC fail notification. This work occured mostly before the IBM acquisition. When the GPL JFS was announced, I tried within IBM for a year to get the code under other terms for use in an IBM GSB product, specifically, the InterJet. The people involved were on a religious/marketing GPL crusade, however. If we had been able to use a JFS, we would have been able to get rid of the remainder of the extra cost in the power supply, and get our costs down further, by using an off-the-shelf supply. Despite the fact that this was costing another division of IBM money, the people releasing the JFS refused to relicense, even for internal use only, the JFS code that they were giving away to the Linux community (I'm sure that, if the AIX people had the code, that it was possible, were we to commit a large enough chunk of our operating budget, to get the code from the AIX people, but the amortized cost of this would not have reduced our COGS). With JFS under non-GPL'ed terms, we wuld have been able to get perhaps another $120 per unit out of the final end customer cost. In the U.S., this would have let us drop our subscription cost $10/month. In Japan, it would have dropped ~20,000 Yen from the total per unit cost. Forgive me if I don't think that someone outside IBM is going to have any better luck than a group of high band people inside IBM who could demonstrate a business case pertinenet to IBMs financial interests. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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