Re: Petreley on commercial support for non-MS OSes

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 02:02 PM 12/31/98 -0500, Eric M. Bennett wrote:
 
>Even assuming that you are right about the GPL's problems, it would be a
>much different type of threatening and all-absorbing movement.  With the
>GPL, it's people trying to write commercial OSes who are screwed.

Alas, it's people trying to write commericial ANYTHING who are "screwed"
by the GPL. The GPL was intended to hurt those who developed ANY
commercial software. 

In fact, developers of commercial OSes were the second casualty of the
GPL, not the first. The first were developers of C++ compilers, who
have now been forced back into two niches: embedded and Windows.
(I'm really sad that I can't get Watcom C or C++ for other OSes --
including the free ones. It used to be cross-platform and in fact
platform-agnostic. But, alas, Sybase -- despite being under attack
by Microsoft -- only makes the compiler available for Windows, under
the name Power++.)

Also, the GPL doesn't affect very large companies such as Microsoft.
They can afford to develop their own stuff from scratch and/or 
"clean room" GPLed code. It is the small developer of commercial 
software who cannot make use of GPLed code in his own products and 
is therefore at a serious disadvantage.

I'm afraid that Eric Raymond, in his paper, "The Cathedral and the 
Bazaar," got it wrong. In fact, we now have three entities: the 
Fortress (Microsoft), the Cathedral (GPLed software), and the Bazaar 
(everyone else). Both Church and State find the free-wheeling Bazaar 
to be dangerous and seek to control or extinguish it. And they may 
yet do so if we do not work to prevent this from occurring.

>With the GPL, nobody can play hide the ball with APIs or secretly 
>change them, 

Sure they can. Microsoft can "clean-room" GPLed code and use it to
create products with hidden APIs.

>and since there
>is no coherent "ownership" of Linux, nobody is going to force a PC maker
>that preloads Linux to preload a particular office suite as well.

There's nothing to stop the vendor of a major Linux distribution from
doing this.

Watch for Red Hat to start offering attractive deals for a bundle
containing its version of Linux and the office suite of its choice.
Ditto Caldera and Corel. When one of them becomes dominant, you may
see a similar situation to the one with Microsoft. No, there's nothing
in the GPL that precludes this.

>Note that although some vendors are embracing Linux by developing for it,
>they are not using the GPL for their own products.  I think the vendors
>realize the advantages of developing for a GPLed OS, and I also think they
>see the disadvantages of using the GPL for their own products.

Methinks that you might be drawing an artificial line between OSes and 
other products. Why grant a special exception for one type of software
product? I can see a potential "slippery slope" here.

--Brett