[Ilugc] Understanding Free and Open source code licenses
- From: lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Kenneth Gonsalves)
- Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2011 11:03:54 +0530
On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 21:51 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
what happened to netbsd? as far as I can see it is still alive and
kicking. So what is the problem?
Alive, yes. Kicking, not really. They had a big problem not too
long
ago where the organizations working with NetBSD were doing proprietary
forks without channelling those changes back and essentially stalling
the development almost entirely. This mail was from one of the
founders of NetBSD btw.
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html ;
this mail has nothing whatsoever to do with license or contributing back
or anything. The key part of the mail is these two paragraphs:
<quote>
Unfortunately, we made some mistakes here. As we've seen over the
years, one of the great successes of Linux was that it had a strong
leader, who set goals and directions, and was able to get people to do
what he wanted -- or find someone else to do it. This latter part is
also a key element; there was no sense that anyone else "owned" a piece
of Linux (although de facto "ownership" has happened in some parts); if
you didn't produce, Linus would use someone else's code. If you wanted
people to use your stuff, you had to keep moving.
NetBSD did not have this. Partly due to lack of people, and partly due
to a more corporate mentality, projects were often "locked". One person
would say they were working on a project, and everyone else would be
told to refer to them. Often these projects stagnated, or never
progressed at all. If they did, the motivators were often very slow.
As a result, many important projects have moved at a glacial pace, or
never materialized at all.
</unquote>
and if you look at it closely, this is precisely the reason for the failure of
hurd which is under the gpl!
License has nothing to do with whether a project sustains or not. Methodology
and leadership are all.
--
regards
KG
http://lawgon.livejournal.com
Coimbatore LUG rox
http://ilugcbe.techstud.org/
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