Bye bye BSD, Hello Linux: A Sys Admin's Story

[droidhacker]

GPLv3 is a non-starter in the Enterprise. GPLv2 is still used and will continue to be but no company with proprietary information will ever use GPLv3. Bring it up in a meeting and get laughed out of the room.
BSD on the other hand, no qualms from the legal department whatsoever.

That is a massive over-generalization, and makes several assumptions that are very far from universal.
Many "enterprise" uses of open source software will find GPLv3 to be HIGHLY practical.

Imagine the scenario where your customers are highly technical. Your product is something INTENDED for customization. You write up something special for your customers to use, and want to make sure that your COMPETITORS can't tivoize your software into THEIR hardware, which is something that their application of your fancy features would require. In this example, you would pick GPLv3 because it both makes the code available for your customers, and makes it UNUSABLE to your competitors. Now instead of their customers being able to get your features on their hardware, they HAVE to go to you. GPLv3 = profit++.

Every license has its place.
Every scenario is different.
You pick the license that makes the most sense for YOUR application.

[russofris]

I don't think so. What changed in apple that led to their peak (which, of course, is on its way back down), was a couple of new gadgets that they marketed very aggressively

I do not necessarily disagree with this. I do think that iPodPhone/Pad was the catalyst for quite a few Mac converts, though by 2007, the Mac (and OSX) was in good enough shape to handle the influx of new customers. The Pre-x86 Macs, with the possible exception of the last G5 models, were a bit silly in my opinion.

I think that their diminished 'peak', is more a result of market saturation than increased competition.

[Del_]

GPLv3 is a non-starter in the Enterprise. GPLv2 is still used and will continue to be but no company with proprietary information will ever use GPLv3. Bring it up in a meeting and get laughed out of the room.

BSD on the other hand, no qualms from the legal department whatsoever.

I have no interest in being dragged into this mud-slinging contest, but your statement needs to be answered since it seems to be the most popular astroturfing bullshit on the net today, and left un-checked will leave readers with the impression that it is true.

There is no question that you have some enterprise forces not particularly fond of GPL, and that v3 provided a nice opportunity for those forces to play on chisms in the communitiy. Apple comes to mind.

There are only two significant differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3. Those are the anti-Tivo clause and the patent protection. The patent protection is a no-brainer, it is basically the same as what you find in Apache 2.0 and widely adopted in enterprise (except for Apple and a couple of other patent trolls). The anti-Tivo clause is basically only potentially problematic for vendors of embedded devices, so a rather small part of the enterprises of this world, and even for them it seems only problematic for the low leve code (none of them have issues with Samba using GPLv3, and why should they).

I have brought GPLv3 up in many meetings and never been laughed at.

[Guest]

I have no interest in being dragged into this mud-slinging contest, but your statement needs to be answered since it seems to be the most popular astroturfing bullshit on the net today, and left un-checked will leave readers with the impression that it is true.

There is no question that you have some enterprise forces not particularly fond of GPL, and that v3 provided a nice opportunity for those forces to play on chisms in the communitiy. Apple comes to mind.

There are only two significant differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3. Those are the anti-Tivo clause and the patent protection. The patent protection is a no-brainer, it is basically the same as what you find in Apache 2.0 and widely adopted in enterprise (except for Apple and a couple of other patent trolls). The anti-Tivo clause is basically only potentially problematic for vendors of embedded devices, so a rather small part of the enterprises of this world, and even for them it seems only problematic for the low leve code (none of them have issues with Samba using GPLv3, and why should they).

I have brought GPLv3 up in many meetings and never been laughed at.

Its true that this is more complicated than meets the eye, when you can use GPLv3, by all means, do it (assuming you merely use software and don't need to modify it). Also there is the 'problem' of copyleft, but that's just the formality.
But one must admit that v2 or 'lesser' suits businesses more (and business is generally inherently focused on getting things done as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, prefferably without letting concurency free pass to their technology).
But if you have 2 equally suited pieces of software to get the job done, you go for the one with BSD license (which is more 'free' when circumstances change).

Overall, I like to say that GPL is moving towards 'enforcing freedom' (oxymoron).

[Del_]

But one must admit that v2 or 'lesser' suits businesses more (and business is generally inherently focused on getting things done as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, prefferably without letting concurency free pass to their technology).

What makes you reach that conclusion? I have just explained to you the difference between v3 and v2. Why do you see v3 as problematic compared to v2? Business is a pretty broad term, most of them embraces more modern licenses than v2 since most businesses wants as little hassle as possible from patenting litigation. That is why Apache 2.0 is widely more popular than BSD right now. Stop mudding the waters, if copy-left is your problem then be honest about it. If not, explain your issue. Aaand, please stop making wide ranging statements about businesses unless you can back it up.

But if you have 2 equally suited pieces of software to get the job done, you go for the one with BSD license (which is more 'free' when circumstances change).

Freedom is an ambigous term, your statement has no value without qualifiers. Freedom to do what? Freedom for who? It all depends on what you want to accomplish. One thing that is overwhelmingly clear today is that we would have no free desktop without copy-left. For some of us, that is pretty important, also freebsd users.

[kpedersen]

<verbal diarrhoea>

endman you little troll, are you still doing this? I have read countless posts from you whining about BSD and all the latest problems it causes you. If you don't like the darn OS, why are you still investing so much time in running it to experience these issues?

If anyone wants a bit of a giggle, check out the OP's profile to see someone with a real BSD flavoured chip on their shoulder. Almost every single thread and post they have made is against BSD rather than anything actually constructive lol.

For the record, I like BSD and I like Linux. However I don't like little trolls like endman.

Edit:
I vote to get this thread title changed to "Bye bye OS, Hello similar OS: A little troll's Story"

[DMJC]

I'm not going to weigh in on which OS is better, has more features stability etc out of BSD and Linux I personally use Linux the most, and I love it's commandline environment and it's rich driver support.

You will never convince Apple to move to Linux. Just look at the sourcecode for the different kernels and you'll see why. Apple's kernel is C++ based. their drivers are very easy to read and use approximately 1/3rd the code that Linux uses to create a PCI Soundcard driver. I was looking to implement a sound blaster Live! driver for Mac OSX last year. Just on code size the OSX drivers are tiny compared to Linux. There's a ton of boilerplate code that exists in the Linux drivers to initialise PCI and handle hardware interrupts. On OSX it's very straightforward and they reuse the same code across all their drivers. I don't know enough about PCI and interrupts to know if that stops OSX from having some capabilities with older hardware, or non-Macintosh hardware. But from a code maintainability view, there's no way Apple will ever switch to Linux. A sound driver that's 700kb on Linux achieves the same featureset on Macintosh in under 200kb of code. I'm sure Apple also has a lot of customisations at the kernel level that tie directly into Quartz/Aqua.

What I would like to see done on OSX is the removal of the BSD commandline environment, and replace it completely with the GNU tools. Right now OSX is a total pain to install applications/utilities such as glib, gtk, gnome, and related libraries, because the BSD commandline tools clash with the GNU tools. Both Linux and OSX have their merits. I prefer the Apple UI, but I hate trying to port my GTK based Linux apps to OSX (because I can't setup GTK/GLIB on OSX to start with compilable code, before I remove the GTK parts to replace with Apple parts.). I love programming on Linux, it's easily got the best development environment in terms of commandline compilers, text editors etc.

That's my $0.02, anyone else have thoughts on this?

[gens]

That's my $0.02, anyone else have thoughts on this?

if you are talking about core-utils, BSD ones are way cleaner then GNU's (idk OSX)

mmm.. are the GTK tools your problem there ?
(GTK is GimpTK, not GNU)

[endman]

if you are talking about core-utils, BSD ones are way cleaner then GNU's (idk OSX)

Care to provide an example gens and backup your claims?

[endman]

BSD commandline tools suck worst then UNIX. It can't compete with GNU.

GNU tools were designed to way outperform UNIX tools. Actually, GNU tools are used in both Mac OS X and Solaris because their own commandline and BSD tools were incapable of meeting users needs.