Quoting jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in:
On Thursday 17 August 2006 03:25 am, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
Umm...not to belittle BSD community but BSD isn't not exactly known widely, is it? Sure, they have great stuff but its not always superior
Marketing.
True. Strangely there isn't much to prove this. Why did not Redhat, Cygnus or Canonical choose to go the BSD way? My guess is nobody likes the prospect of having M$ laying its hands on the code. ;-)
The commons relies on it's members' good behaviour to succeeed. But often u will have bad apples. The GPL ensures that one can use the law to keep the bad apples inline. BSD does not have this fall back mechanism and would be very hard pressed to remain relevant over a long period. It's reliance on a fairly closed community makes for great performance but will not permit much innovation.
compare the number of contributers to postgresql (bsd-style) to the number of contributors to mysql (GPL).