M Harris wrote:
On Thursday 14 September 2006 10:54, John E. Perry wrote:
it was common practice for a company to tweak BSD for their own use, then charge 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars for their "proprietary" operating system. This got even worse after UCB dropped the requirement for attribution in the 90's. Thankfully those days are behind us...
Quite so. But what put them behind us was the GPL unix. Linux made it less beneficial to keep your modifications hidden, so bsd prospered along with linux.
In fact, those "proprietary" OSes are at this point nothing more than redundant. There just isn't a business case these days to pay $$$$ for Unix from any vendor while rock solid enterprise linux distros are being produced for $. The Unix of yesterday is about as useful today as the mainframe of yesterday.
_That_ was the point I was trying to make. Even so, there's still darwin at least, and, as someone else pointed out, MS is also using bsd as a club to try to beat the rest of us to death, as they did so many others. -- John Perry