Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Sorry if I seem hard on RMS.

Author:Brett Glass
Posted:8/25/2000; 9:25:35 AM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20196 (In response to 20189)
Prev/Next:20195 / 20197

The man has done such an incredible amount of harm via his propaganda and misleading rhetoric that it is hard to measure. Forgive me if I sometimes express my outrage at this.

As for routing around the GPL: BSD-licensed software doesn't always help very much. Once the market is destroyed, it's gone.... Even if there is BSD-licensed code to build on, you still will have a hard time selling product. BeOS is a good example. Even though FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are there to draw on, Linux is hurting Be's prospects for survival. Interestingly, it is aiding and abetting Microsoft in this. Adherents of the GPL should take note: the GPL hurts small software vendors -- ones which might one day compete with Microsoft -- far more than it hurts Microsoft. Microsoft has enough money to reimplement everything from scratch if it wants to; it's the little guys who need to reuse publicly available source code to survive.

--Brett

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