Re: [Sheflug] GPL software ?

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 03:43, Denis Nikitin wrote:
> I thought mine adsl router is (conexant), but now I am not so sure.

I don't know any on the market which are BSD based.

> Anyway, 'restriction' of GPL meant to be a compliment to GPL though 
> as IMHO it's an only truly free open source license.

I think you mean "free software licence" ;) 

> BSD license can be resold and that's why it's more accepted by the
> companies like microsoft (they 'opened' parts of the  .NET under bsd
> license) or apple (OSX) . Correct me if I am wrong.

You're kind of half-right. GPL'd software can be resold, BSD doesn't
give you that. I think you're talking about the ability to proprietise
other people's work; the GPL doesn't allow you to do that. However, that
doesn't really seem to be of interest to many companies. Most commercial
"open source" is covered by the GPL, and the two examples you give don't
prove your idea either: MS didn't open part of .NET, they paid someone
to re-implement part of it (Rotor), and they didn't BSD it (if I
remember correctly, I think they dreamed up their own not-free-software
licence). OS X is indeed mostly BSD, but all the BSD bits they use
aren't proprietary. They give back a lot of code to the community;
they're quite good citizens. So it would seem that aspect of the
licensing arrangement isn't what appeals to them either.

> > I would guess BSD would be a bad choice due to poor portability and
> > hardware support - Linux is better supported on embedded hardware. Even
> > WindRiver now support it.
> Wow wow wow. 
> That's a brave assumption :))

Not really; it's provable. (Note, I said "BSD" and "portability *and*
hardware support" - yes, one BSD is very portable, that's beside the
point).

Of the lists I could find, I can only see six commercial products which
can run BSD. Broadcom, for example, sell boards like the BCM91250A which
is capable of running BSD. But, it also runs Linux and that's really
what people are more likely to be interested in. And these aren't
commercial products per se, they're development devices.

I could find http://www.root-hq.com/products/RGW2400.html, which is
supposedly a BSD-based router. That's it. If Linux wasn't the better
solution by a country mile, you would find a lot more examples of BSD
being used.

Cheers,

Alex.

___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group -
http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.