[Asterisk-Users] Re: Advice on OS Choice

[Jason T. Nelson]

In our last exciting episode, Kevin Walsh (kevin at cursor.biz) said:
> With Red Hat Enterprise, you're paying for the "privilege" of getting
> a packaged distro with support and upgrades.  If you don't need the
> support then you can freely use White Box and get exactly the same code.
> The White Box distro can get away with this because of the GPL.  If
> GNU/Linux was licensed under a BSD-style license then Red Hat could
> easily close the source - just as Apple did when they stole BSD code
> to create "their" OS/X effort.  I don't believe that Red Hat would do
> that sort of thing anyway - those tactics are best left to Apple and
> Microsoft.

Umm.. subtle but very important point here. Apple did not "steal" BSD code.
BSD code cannot be stolen. It is given away as basically a gift. Stealing
implies that the person you stole from has now lost something. I don't
see FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD as having lost anything; in fact, Apple
has returned many things to the community without being coerced as could
be said about GPL-licensed code.

-- 
Jason T. Nelson <jtn at jtn.cx>                     http://www.jtn.cx/~jtn/
GPG key fingerprint = 6272 5482 EDDD D0A3 FED2  262A FABB 599D FF67 6C9E
disclaimer: My opinions are my own. Don't bother my employer about them.
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