[LUNI] Re: [Mwblug] Amazon switches to Linux

[Martin Maney]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 12:41:47PM -0600, lembark at wrkhors.com wrote:
> Example would be each commercial vendor (e.g., IBM) deciding
> to fork the source in order to optimize it for their own 
> platform and userbase. Would leave Linux in the same shape 
> *NIX in general was with IRIX, HP-UX and AIX.

Nope, that's the crucial difference between the GPL and the BSD licenses:
those "proprietary" customizations would have to be made available, so
anything that was widely liked could be absorbed back into the "stock"
codebase.  In fact, there's plenty of reason to think that the knowledge of
this has made it unnecessary to actually do so, since the IBMs, HPs, SGIs,
et. al., have chosen to work towards getting the things they want into
Linus's tree directly.

I think it's worked because it's the stick in a classic carrot and stick
combination.  The carrot is, of course, the chance to have truly
interoperable, open systems that will maximize the pie that everyone hopes
for a slice of in a way that the fragmentation of Unix, under proprietary
licenses (which the BSD license allowed code to be absorbed into), largely
self-defeated.  We have learned from history, and if we are reinventing
Unix, this time at least we are doing it so that it won't need to be done
again.

My, that took a turn for the pompous there at the end, didn't it?  :-)

-- 
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.  -- Kipling on MS Enterprise Licensing