suse@rio.vg wrote:
Siegbert Baude wrote:
Indeed. SuSE also uses RPMs developed by RedHat, and I'm certain there are countless others. That's the nature of open source. Everyone adds to the whole, making Linux better for everyone. This is one of Linux's main strengths over both closed source and BSD-style licenses. Do you like to elaborate why this should be not the case for BSD-style
suse@rio.vg schrieb: licenses? The possibility to keep your modified code closed doesn't influence the openness of the project. Please check how many important projects out there use non-GPL licenses.
Because GPL requires that any code added to a GPL project be itself GPL'd. BSD does not. This is not only a technicality, but also affects the culture of their respective projects.
It's also the reason that BSD, like all other unixes, was losing ground to Apple and MS until linux came out. Since anyone could use and distribute their own code without revealing it, 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. You still have to pay 10's of thousands of dollars for OS updates to at least one Forida-based BSD vendor I could name. -- John Perry