[openbeos] Re: [Glasselevator-talk] Re: Glasselevator-talk digest, Vol 1 #3 - 3 msgs (themes and other apps)...

  • From: "Daniel Reinhold" <danielr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 13:57:54 CST

>>I have to disagre with you David. And Ithamar's missing the point 
too.
>
>And I think you were missing my point Daniel :)
>
>>Deej, is right. We cannot control alternate or "rogue" version from 
>>appearing. Anyone, absolutely anyone can checkout our entire source 
>>tree at any time. They can then proceed to make changes from minor to 
>>major, recompile, then redistribute it as an another OS. Our license 
>>does not prohibit this.
>
>That's right, and that's cool. A few people might misuse that, but if 
>e.g. the guys from FinalScratch decide they want to make a distro 
>specificly for a machine running FinalScratch, all the best to them :)
>
>>All we can do is promote an "official" version and a set of standards 
>>for it. If we do it right, no one would want an alternate version. Of 
>>course, this is all hypothetical talk at the moment, because we are a 
>>long way away from having a source tree for a complete OS. But when 
we 
>>do -- be prepared -- rip-offs will appear as sure as the sun rises.
>
>Don't agree here. We can promote our baseline, and let distributors 
>make their own adaptions and hopefully give some of that back for 
>consideration in the baseline. We get to decide what goes into the 
>baseline, and they get to decide what goes into the distro. It's a 
>linux-like world out there.....
>

Ithamar, anyone can download the code, make changes, recompile, then 
redistribute under a different name. Period. We don't have control over 
that. That's my point.

>Only the public for the distro's is pretty much more limited, so I 
>guess there will be room for just 1 or 2 main distro's and the rest 
>will automagicly whither away. If they don't, they must have a right 
>for existance :)
>
>If you don't like the way this works, you took the wrong road and 
>should have made OBOS closed-source.....
>
>Regards,
>
>Ithamar.

What, me personally have problems with it? Of course not. I was in 
there right from the beginning in those first days of the mailing list 
(remember? I think you and I were the first two people, after Michael, 
on the list). I argued for a very liberal license and against the GPL. 
I was quite happy when the MIT license was chosen.

I also knew, right there and then, that this left us open to others 
coming in and carting off with the code for their own purposes. But it 
didn't and still doesn't bother me. I support competition. I think that 
we can do a good job with our version and maintain a high quality 
"official" standard that most people would prefer to use. It's just 
that, today, I am surprised to hear comments from people stating that 
we can somehow "control" the process. We can control what we do. We 
can't stop others from making alternate versions of our work. That's 
the reality.

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