On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Justin Krejci wrote:

> On Friday 23 February 2007 02:11, T.J. Duchene wrote:
>
>> The BSD crowd, though love to share ideas with everyone, as well as 
>> code - much to their credit.  There are those though (again, my 
>> opinion) who abuse their work, by making derivatives solely 
>> proprietary.
>
> Is it really abuse? Is there an expectation that they give something back?

You are right.  There is no such expectation and that is why BSD is not a 
very good license.


> And actually they technically are giving something back: their 
> product/service is probably better because of the free access to free 
> quality code.

In other words, what we are getting back is more powerful competition from 
the multi-billion dollar proprietary software industry.  This helps to 
promote the myth that proprietary software is better than free software.


> If Microsoft is (or maybe its now "was") using BSD derived networking 
> code, don't you think their networking code is probably better off and 
> less likely to be vulnerable thus making the internet and websites and 
> internet services you use that are running on or dependent on windows 
> more reliable? You win, they win, we all win. :)

Strengthening Microsoft is not exactly the kind of winning that I want to 
be a part of.  In fact, I would say that your argument makes a good case 
for the exact opposite of what you are concluding.

Mike