freebsd should be rewritten based on microkernel architecture

[Aryeh Friedman]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:24 PM Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions <
freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Apr 2020 11:26:54 -0400, Aryeh Friedman wrote:
> >> On Fri, 17 Apr 2020 20:50:09 -0400, Aryeh Friedman wrote:
> >> >And here goes the *ABSOLUTE* reason why no developer who ever hopes
> >> >to make any money at all from their work should *EVER* use GPL.
> >>
> >> It's utter nonsense! Without doubts MIT, BSD and other licenses are
> >> better for some projects, while for other projects GPL could grant a
> >> bonus.
> >
> >Not according to the FreeBSD foundation who recommends against GPL in
> >almost all cases.
> >
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html
> >(see sections 9 and 10)
>
> They do not use the terms "absolute" and "ever".
>

Maybe since English is not your native language then some of the subtle
context is lost but to a native speaker they say just that but much subtler
way (but is unmistakable what their preference is) while recognizing for
historical reasons some stuff has to stay GPL.   See the -hackers@ and
-current@ lists if you want to see a huge amount of effort to remove as
much GPL code in the base system as possible.


>
> Btw. if there are already a lot of GPL licensed libraries and kernel
> abilities available for a project of some domain, that are not
> available by such an amount, if at all by another licensed
> infrastructure, it could become very expensive to create the required
> infrastructure.
>

That's one reason why the ports collection exists to cleanly divorce the
stuff that is hard to remove GPL from what is critical to the core of the
OS.    Also /usr/src/contrib is where all stuff that cannot cleanly be used
under BSD goes to make it clear it is legally separate then the rest of the
base system (legally no different than RH or any other Linux dist does when
they combine many works from different licenses into a packaged OS).


> Those who make a living from whatever licensed software probably have
> reasons to chose a particular license. Some probably chose the wrong
> license by mistake, other chose a license that is good for them and
> their customers.
>

Some of them are forced to pick the wrong license due to the libraries that
are required for their work (this is my #1 objection to GPL).   This is the
main reason I am so ardent in calling GPL "evil".


> I can't see that you are that successful with your business, as the
> coder of Ardour is with his business. That might be a wrong conclusion,
> let alone that the software license not necessarily is the reason for
> more or less success. However, you are seemingly not programming in all
> domains, but you don't restrain from generalizing.
>

1. Do some research before drawing conclusions if you did you would see
over the 30 years of my career I have worked in many different domains of
software development.

2. Since almost all my current work is covered by NDA's forced on me by
clients (I would prefer not to have them) there is no way you can judge or
not judge how successful I am

3. Are you a developer?  If not, you likely don't understand the economics
of software development as well as you think you do

According to the Wikipedia article on Ardour, it's primary author was hired
by a hardware company to work full time on Ardour.   This is consistent
with the claim I have made throughout the entire thread that it is
impossible to work on GPL'ed projects and make a living unless your are
subsidized by some organization whose primary business is not the software
but complements the software.   For example hardware companies love
open-source because it makes their hardware more useful to their customers
(they are not software companies).    This does not translate to a software
only company, for self evident reasons, nor to a company that requires
one-off custom software for its primary business (such as many medical
applications).

If you want to pick a better example of a successful open source project
that makes money I would say you should go with firefox (which is
successful, via donations, due to overwhelming critical mass not because
people would buy it if it was commercial)


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-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org