Is this bunk.

David Kelly dkelly at hiwaay.net
Mon Aug 23 03:17:47 UTC 2010


On Aug 22, 2010, at 7:25 PM, Garry wrote:

> This is a conversation held on a UK group page, can you confirm or deny this
> as twaddle.
> 
> Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor lock-in),
> they do give a little back to BSDs, but have made sure that BSDs can't get
> much off of them, but they can get a lot out of BSD.

Apple hired a lot of key people from the FreeBSD project. I don't know just what comes back to FreeBSD out of Apple but suspect the reason you and myself don't know is that Apple doesn't care to toot their own horn. Apple made a significant contribution a while back testing and improving NFS.

As for how much of MacOS X is BSD, pretty much all of the command line stuff. Apple has gone to great lengths to XML-ize most everything so while MacOS is BSD, its probably the most distant BSD cousin.

> Also, Windows uses  (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking for
> instance.

NT 3.51 used to flash a Berkeley Software Distribution copyright message on the text console during boot because some code was used. Doubt MS could leave well enough alone to simply lift the entire stack. The VMS-inspired NT kernel was probably not organized in such a way as to optimally use an unmodified BSD network protocol stack.

> So, in supporting/using BDS i would enevatibaly end up writing code for it,
> or filing bugs or whatever.
> (I have assisted with a few Linux drivers and written kernel patches, as
> well as working on things like DirectX 3D 9 for Wine and work on KDE etc...)
> 
> Having seen how BDS license software has been used, to create highly tied
> in, almost crippled proprietary software, I do not feel that I can support
> software developed under such licenses.

So why are you here? Trolling?

It bugs the heck out of some people when others manage to build on their work to make something better, and then not give it away to everyone else. Others realize that if what we do is truly useful then others will want to use it to build bigger and better things. That it doesn't matter if we sell our work or give it away, what others do with it is no skin off our noses. Our original work is still exactly as accessible as it was before others made something more of their own version of it.

> Web-Kit has actually worked quite well as an open system, even though Apple
> done a hostile take over of the project from KHTML in KDE.
> So, the GPL has worked to produce an open product in Web-kit but the BSD
> license has lead to vendor lock-in on the part of Microsoft and most
> significantly Apple.

Thats one of the big problems of the GPL-mindset. Seems they spend a whole lot more time cloning the work of others than in actually creating anything new.

> This does not mean to say that I have a problem with the quality of the code
> in BSD, I just feel that the license is counter productive.

There is nothing in the BSD license permitting a "hostile takeover." Some would claim FreeBSD has executed a "hostile takeover" of what it is to be BSD. The pre-FreeBSD code is out there, you are welcome to it. Some would say OpenBSD attempted a hostile takeover of BSD.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.





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