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From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Restrictions on 'free' UNIX / 386BSD (Re: selling 386BSD)
Message-ID: <WLEIPPE@taronga.com>
Date: 17 Aug 92 10:54:59 GMT
References: <PHR.92Aug15214245@soda.berkeley.edu> <YSDIBS4@taronga.com> <PHR.92Aug16224207@soda.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
Lines: 29
In article <PHR.92Aug16224207@soda.berkeley.edu> phr@soda.berkeley.edu (Paul Rubin) writes:
> OK, I missed one aspect of this in my previous article. There is a large
> category of people who now benefit from GCC who would not be able to
> benefit from a GPL-covered 386BSD. Next, Sun (In Solaris 2), and I believe
> MIPS ship GCC with their products, in some cases as the primary compilers.
> This sort of distribution is not practical for an operating system.
>Why is it practical for compilers and not OS's?
Because the compiler distribution is subsidised by the OS distribution. If
the OS itself has no protection against unsupported copying, what is there
to subsidise it?
>In the old days, OS's came with source code, and users and system
>maintainers benefited greatly from this.
In the old days, OSes were subsidised by hardware sales and rental. In fact,
OSes were only provided to support hardware sales. That's not true any more:
even for proprietary systems, operating systems are products in their own
right. And for clonable machines (Sparc, MIPS, x86) the O/S has to be a
profit center in its own right.
Also, as BSDI has demonstrated, "coming with source code" and "free" are in
no way synonymous.
--
`-_-'
Have you hugged your wolf today? 'U`
Peter da Silva, Taronga Park BBS, Houston, TX +1 713 568 0480/1032