Threat to FreeBSD in Europe?

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Colin Percival said on May 14, 2004 at 10:02:05:
> At 09:49 14/05/2004, Mark Ovens wrote:
> >http://software.newsforge.com/software/04/05/13/1447225.shtml?tid=132&tid=150&tid=82
> 
>   FreeBSD is thriving in the US.  Suggesting that the EU adopting US-style
> patent rules would threaten FreeBSD is consequently ironic at best.
>   Free Software has been riding on the coat-tails of commercial software
> for far too long, and this article is just an attempt by Mandrakesoft
> to preserve their ability to do that.

No, this is an attempt to avoid a future where all European software
developers (free or otherwise) will have to spend their time and
effort dodging patents for idiotic "innovations" like the XOR cursor
and Amazon's one-click shopping.  

True, they have to dodge such patents anyway if they want a piece of
the US market.  That doesn't mean Europe should introduce similar
rules too.

>   Wake up guys; if Free Software is going to succeed, it has to innovate
> for itself.  And, whatever some people may think, looking at someone else's
> wheel, building your own, and then giving it away for free does not
> constitute innovation.

I think you have it backwards.  Many of the "wheels" moved from BSD to
commercial software, rather than the other way around.  Increasingly,
commercial unix is picking up free software "wheels" like
GNOME/KDE/Mozilla and (in an earlier generation) GNU Emacs.  

And I still wish the GNU readline library was more widespread in the
commercial world (or the non-GPL free software world, for that
matter).  Unfortunately, RMS knew how useful it was and deliberately
licensed it under the GPL rather than the LGPL.  In a similar
situation (seeing something good in proprietary-land), the free
software community would have reinvented it; not a single commercial
company has done that, and if you're used to it in GNU software,
command-line editing becomes a torture on any commercial unix or any
non-GPL software package.  (Come to think of it, python does have very
readline-like capabilities, and groks my .inputrc, but doesn't seem to
be linked to the readline library and isn't GPL-licensed.  Perhaps
they did reinvent that particular wheel.)

Rahul