Commercial Distribution?

[Scott W]

Shantanoo wrote:

>+++ Scott W [freebsd] [06-01-04 22:39 -0500]:
>| I know this one may be seen as sacrilege to some, but think about this:
>| 
>| 1.  *BSD uses a fairly significant amount of GNU and GPL licensed 
>| (opposed to the BSD license) code in it.  gcc, Perl, XFree86, Apache, 
>| GNU Make, autoconf, mysql, PostgreSQL, etc etc.  While it can be argued 
>| many/most of these are not part of the core OS, what about:  gcc, 
>| objective c, libreadline, cvs, diff, tar, sort, patch and friends?  
>| (from /usr/src/gnu and /usr/src/usr.bin )
>
>I think PostgreSQL is released under BSD license.
>I can't find a line in tar's man page that it is GNU's tar.
>Apache's testing platform is FreeBSD. So probably it is release under
>BSD license. Will have to check it out though.
>
>Shantanoo
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>  
>
tar builds under /usr/src/gnu/usr.src.tar and AUTHORS credits it as GNU tar.
I did note that about the man page, which is odd (although not a big deal).

You're correct about Apache, or at least more correct than I was in 
listing it- Apache uses to use it's own license, and Postgres is in fact 
a BSD license.  That's what I get for relying on memory ;-)

That still doesn't remove (IMHO of course) the validity of my statement 
about calling FreeBSD and OS but Linux not based on licensing- FreeBSD 
wouldn't exist in it's current incarnation without the use of GPL and 
GNU software.  Nor would Linux.  Postgres has existed for almost as long 
as Linux, but it and Apache both have certainly had a huge amount of 
effort concentrated on them, not an insignificant amount of which was 
generated by the fact of more and more Linux (and yes, certainly *BSD, 
but arguably to a lesser extent) servers, as well as end-users 
discovering bugs, asking for features etc etc...if I'm not mistaken, IBM 
has been involved with Apache regardless of licensing, which is 
certainly a direct result of their 'embracing' of Linux.

Note that isn't a slam by far in any ways- I certainly use both on my 
own servers, and would likely choose *BSD over Linux for client's web 
and mail/external accessible sites due to the default security being 
significantly better (which is still checked and changed as needed 
before someone may make the comment about installing an 'out of box' 
install to the world ;-), as well as the core install being 
significantly smaller than the current gen of Linux distros.  I just 
don't like to see fallacy's propgated about either OS... (or any other 
than Windblows actually ;-)

Scott