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Lan Barnes wrote:
This does not, however, address the religious conflict some people have with SW companies that <shudder> make money. Look at the raft Red Hat gets from some quarters for daring to have a bottom line.
Nobody shudders over software companies making money. Not even RMS. RMS makes money on software too. He even used to charge people for copies of the GNU utils on tape before the Internet was around. What he did not do was restrict what you could do with the software once you had it. Those sorts of restrictions are what people shudder over for reasons exactly like this BK mess. Because BK is not FOSS they were able to change the terms of its licensing as soon as someone looked like they might be doing something BitMover didn't like which really throws a wrench into kernel development. In hindsight I bet Linus is saying he should have just rolled his own ages ago instead of getting involved with the current mess. Hopefully he will remember the lesson well.
- -- Tracy R Reed
The original objections to BK was it's viral license: anyone who looked at its source was owned for life by BK's owner. IOW, any programmer who ever looked at or had some access to BK's code was considered tainted. Apparently, it was not clear exactly what restrictions were imposed by BK's license. That was reason enough for most FOSS developers to stay away from it. Especially kernel developers.
Apparently Linux didn't have a problem with it, at least in the way he used it, but it seems he was the odd man out.
There was quite a lengthy discussion (argument? war?) over this on the LKML.
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Best Regards,
~DJA.-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
