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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!news.ppp.de!news.Hanse.DE!wavehh.hanse.de!cracauer From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer) Subject: Re: Linux vs. BSD?! Message-ID: <1995Mar5.171038.26486@wavehh.hanse.de> Organization: The Internet References: <3ira54$7vq@quandong.itd.adelaide.edu.au> <3ivt1u$ip@fido.asd.sgi.com> <3j04a0$sfu@deep.rsoft.bc.ca> <3j0fch$j72@fido.asd.sgi.com> <3j0qv0$ai3@deep.rsoft.bc.ca> <1995Mar1.111604.25864@wavehh.hanse.de> <3jbrf1$vl@delos.BSDI.COM> Date: Sun, 5 Mar 95 17:10:38 GMT Lines: 74 Tony Sanders <sanders@earth.com> writes: >I'm not posting officially for BSDI, just giving you some >perspective on the bigger picture. [He gave several examples what problems would come up when BSDI would have to use a GPLed base]. I don't want to quote the individual reasons here, all your points are certainly right. Some of your current customers wouldn't use you product if you had to live with GPLed code. My intention was to show that BSDI wouldn't be impossible with a GPLed OS base and I think that what you showed wouldn't make *all* your customers choose someone else's product. But, as I think of your responce, I must agree that you couldn't follow the model of Cygnus that easily. An OS has more in it than development tools, the X11 server you mention and Cygnus doesn't have to tangle with hardware vendors that provide technical information only under disclosure. > Which doesn't help your "GPL Unix to fight off Microsoft" > argument much either. And do you really want the average DOS > user running Unix anyway? I really don't know the answer to that. > Maybe all they really need is a good WWW browser and a high-speed > SLIP/PPP connection... I don't want every DOS user to use UNIX. I want a UNIX that I can offer an unsatisfied DOS user. I want UNIX to be a base that a DOS user can `upgrade' to and don't loose too much of his productivity while accessing the new features UNIX provide. Currently, the typical DOS user packages like spreadsheets and word processors are of much better quality for MS-Windows. You have to either use Windows emulators or use outdated, slow UNIX versions, if availiable. The current UNIX world focus to expand it's capabilities where UNIX strengths are: Networking, High-Performance computing and less-constraints-programming (the latter is certainly an important factor for Linux). But the result is that you cannot offer the typical DOS user an upgrade path, there are no replacements for his normal applications. This is very hypothetic, but I dont think too much of UNIX's strength's would have been given up when workstation vendors had a common base UNIX and agreed on things like endianess and bus systems. If Sun had picked up the BSD sources as they had and those were GPLed, HP, SGI and DEC could use Sun's version of BSD as a base for their workstations. How much money has been invensted in UNIX development and was it worth the effort? I fail to see why System V Release 4 is so much better than BSD that so much money had to be invested. At least no weakness of BSD has been removed that is as worse as the lack of good standard GUI applications is. As the situation is now, the money has been invested in bloated UNIXes, a bloated GUI base (X11) and a widget set (Motif) with a programming interface that is clearly worse that OWL and even MFC, at least from a C++'s programmer's standpoint. A GPLed base for the operating system of the first workstations would have made it more attractive for vendors to work on a common UNIX base (Or the OS wouldn't have been chosen at all). And don't forget how many people would have been attracted by UNIX with sources because it makes an even better `hacker' platform (hacker here => entusiastic programmer). All the effort now floating in a platform that is still not really acceptable for commercial use (Linux) could have been done for at least 10 jears. So, I still think GPLed code is a good thing and if I were an OS hacker, I would prefer to invest my time into a GPLed OS. -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Private email Martin.Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de Fax +4940 522 8536. No NeXTMail!