[Asterisk-Users] Re: Advice on OS Choice

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:44:40 +0100, Kevin Walsh <kevin at cursor.biz> wrote:
> 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.


With all due respect, Kevin, you are talking out of your three letters.

Apple has released their distro of BSD as open source under a BSD
style license. You can download it, use it free of charge, modify it,
redistribute it, charge for it if you want to ...

http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource

MacOSX is Darwin plus Apple trademarks, plus a GUI which is not open
sourced, plus some proprietary end user applications which Apple have
acquired or developed in house.

The Aqua GUI does not contain BSD code and the underlying libraries
are in-house developed based on software assets acquired from NeXT who
in turn had developed those libraries in-house. They don't contain BSD
code either.

There is thus no code in the MacOSX package that Apple has moved from
open source to closed source.

Apple's packaging an open source operating system with a proprietary
and trademarked GUI is no different from packaged Linux
server/firewall products which have a proprietary and trademarked GUI
front-end to manage them.

And in fact, it is no different from anybody building a proprietary
and trademarked GUI interface for Asterisk and selling it together
with Asterisk.

The choice is yours. You can download the product and use it as is,
free of charge, or modify it to your needs, or you can pay for the GUI
and get it packaged with the GUI, some apps and vendor support. That's
all there is to MacOSX.

I am using SuSE Linux a lot because I like YaST, a centralised system
admin fron-end. I pay 98 USD for SuSE and the only proprietary thing
on there is YaST and its underlying libraries. Since the rest is open
sourced, one might take the view I am paying 98 USD for YaST.

When I buy MacOSX, I pay 129 USD and the proprieatry component is the
Aqua GUI, its underlying libraries and some end user apps. Since the
rest is open sourced, one might take the view I am paying 129 USD for
Aqua and some bundled apps.

Now I am happy to pay 98 USD for YaST, I think it's a great tool that
is worth paying 98 USD for. However, I think that I get orders of
magnitude more value for money paying 129 USD for Aqua and the bundled
apps from Apple. In any event, the effort to make Aqua and bundled
apps was certainly an order of magnitude bigger than the effort to
make YaST.

On the other hand, there is Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, DEC er HPQ Tru64
which all have BSD code in them and they are 100% proprietary and
closed source. So if you start fingerpointing at those who use BSD
code in proprietary packaged OS distributions, then Apple would not be
high on your list ***IF*** only you were looking at the matter
objectively.

Last but not least, the BSD community has received major contributions
from Apple and so have other projects like KDE when Apple chose to
incporporate KHTML into Darwin and contribute significant improvements
back to the KHTML code which benefits Linux users of KHTML just as
much as it benefits Darwin and OSX users.

Let's be fair here, most open source projects, including Linux,
wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today without significant
contributions from big corporations. It rather amounts to hipocrisy
when open source developers accuse those corporations of "stealing
code". It smacks of arrogance, too, for it is nothing more than saying
"my contribution is honest and real but yours is not because I am an
individual and you are a business".

For as long as everybody abides by the rules of the open source
licenses used, there is no justification to make any accusations of
"stealing code". And when companies contribute source code back to
community where the license didn't even mandate them to do so, you
should welcome it instead of spreading untruths.

The companies that should be singled out for bashing are those who
violate the license terms, like Microsoft, who are using the BSD
TCP/IP stack in Windoze without attribution to Berkely University; and
SCO, who have still been distributing their own Linux distro while at
the same time claiming that the GPL was null and void.

rgds
benjk

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Tokyo, Japan.

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