On Friday 27 October 2006 14:36, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
On 27/10/06 11:23 +0530, Baishampayan Ghose wrote:
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I really fail to understand the reason behind your fascination for BSD / MIT style licenses. Do you really think Linux (the kernel) would have been as powerful as t is now had it been released under, say the BSD
Yes. Linux happened at the right time. In case you didn't know your history, the original BSD group was sued by AT&T for releasing BSD in the late 80s/early 90s. The suit was eventually won by the BSD hackers, but they lost crucial momentum in the early 90s (till ~ 1994 or so).
That apart, the majority of coders prefer that their works are not misapropriated and hence prefer to gpl their work, which results in a one way migration of code from bsd to linux.
After ths, the BSD project forked, with FreeBSD focussing on x86, wile NetBSD focussed on portability.
NetBSD has fallen back to the point of being unusable according to the founder in a long rant on the netbsd list.
license? Exactly why do you think FreeBSD doesn't support half the hardware that Linux (the kernel) supports today? Even 5-6 years back
Because Linux ran with the PC, while BSD ran on far more servers. Until 2.6, the BSD kernel was far superior to Linux. With 2.6, Linus had resources from IBM and the NSA thrown in to help, making it take a slight lead over FreeBSD 5.x. Also, FreeBSD 5.x was the first BSD version which had kernel threads, and was basically an experimental release (think Linux 2.5 quality).
Today, more developers use Linux and are happy if their code works there, rather than writing portable code. Earlier, developers would write on *BSD at home, and test on Solaris at work, with the resultant benefits of stability and performance.
FreeBSD was considered far more superior than Linux (the kernel), so exactly what happened to the Linux kernel project in the recent times and how did FreeBSD lose the race?
IBM happened.
why did it not happen to BSD? couldnt be the licence?
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kernel or gcc, you need to give up some freedoms to make sure the essential freedoms are maintained no matter what. Otherwise you may
Misconception (or inapropriate words). Permission to treat others less equally than yourself is not freedom, it's exploitation. The gpl does not ask u to give up freedom. It tells u treat others exactly equally. .