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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Restrictions on free UNIX / 386BSD (Re: selling 386BSD) Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!sdd.hp.com!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!caen!uunet!think.com!unixland!rmkhome!rmk From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) Organization: The Man With Ten Cats Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 04:41:28 GMT Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) Message-ID: <9208162341.30@rmkhome.UUCP> References: <PHR.92Aug15151100@soda.berkeley.edu> <63DILTJ@taronga.com> <PHR.92Aug15214245@soda.berkeley.edu> <YSDIBS4@taronga.com> Lines: 22 In article <YSDIBS4@taronga.com> peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <PHR.92Aug15214245@soda.berkeley.edu> phr@soda.berkeley.edu (Paul Rubin) writes: >> If 386BSD was copylefted, it would be Linux. It's the absence of copyleft >> that leads to the possibility of more than a bunch of random hackers >> benefiting from it. > >>Please clarify this. How is anyone else prevented from benefitting >>from it? Say, for example, the same people who now benefit from GCC? > >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. And from reading comp.unix.solaris, I get the idea that a number of development shops will buy compilers for Solaris 2.0 because of the GNU Copyleft. -- Rick Kelly rmk@rmkhome.UUCP unixland!rmkhome!rmk rmk@frog.UUCP