Re: Blocking Gmail ads
"Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso" <jordigh@gmail.com> writes:
> ... Apple taking code without
> giving back in a usable way, or not giving back at all?
see Darwin- Apple is giving away a bunch of it's OS-level advances.
Like most companies, they don't want to give away their 'core technology'
(which for apple is the gui/UI) but they are happy to give back
in non-competitive areas. It's in their interest, really, as
having a good, solid base OS that they can put a gui on helps them,
but doesn't really help their competitors all that much. The closer
they keep the darwin and FreeBSD codebases, the less work they have to
do to incorporate advances that FreeBSD makes, and the more they benefit
from the massive amount of production testing done on FreeBSD.
Most FreeBSD people seem pretty happy with what apple has done, as we
(both the linux and *BSD community) get some of the OS-level enhancements
apple makes back- This is in Apple's best interest as well, as having a
good, free server platform (without a nice GUI) doesn't really help
apple's competitors much- apple competes on it's nice UI, and cooperating
with the community allows them to get a really good, solid underlying OS
layer without nearly as much R&D cost.
It's pretty win-win- I think it's a good example of how the BSD license
can be better than the GPL. if apple was forced to open-source the
GUI or other 'crown jewels' they would not have used an open-source OS at
all- the *BSD community would have missed their contributions,
and Windows would not have a more-stable competitor in the 'easy to use'
space.
As Darwin is *BSD based, it's much easier to port changes from it to the
other *BSD systems than to Linux, but there is no licensing barrier to
taking Darwin code and porting it to Linux.
Not to say the GPL is bad, or even the AGPL - both enable different business
and development models. I'm just saying that most of the people who
wrote the code that Apple is using are pleased with the result.
here's an interesting discussion on the subject:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2004-July/002484.html
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