Non-linux servers

[Bill McGonigle]

On Dec 12, 2005, at 11:00, Christopher Schmidt wrote:

> Am I missing something or misunderstanding something?

I had the terminology wrong.  Bizgres is expanded by GreenPlum to 
Bizgres MPP which is what they sell.  Sorry, here's a link:

   http://www.greenplum.com/prod_deepgreen_cluster.html  [down at the 
moment - Google cache or try again later]

And it's worth noting they've promised to contribute a bitmap index to 
Postgres "soon", so they're not all take and no give.  I think they 
also send back bug fixes.

> I maintain that for the most part, the license the code
> is under isn't what makes a difference - it's the attitude of the
> company that's behind the code. If you've got people friendly to open
> source, they'll do the right thing. If they don't, I don't think that
> they're going to be stopped by the fact that the code is GPL, or BSD, 
> or
> anything else - in the end, proving that someone took open code and did
> something with it becomes really hard, (Isn't this kind of the problem
> with Linksys for a long time? They didn't open their code by choice,
> iirc) and forcing people to open up is hard too.

It's a good point - and in the case of Apple it works properly.  They 
understand things like licenses and community, at least once given a 
sufficient nudge.  But in the case of Linksys they don't understand any 
of that - they just wanted a free OS for their router.  When someone 
said to them, "Oh, and you have to give us the source," they said, "no, 
I don't think we do," and then we said, "look right here - this is the 
license you agreed to," they said, "oh, well I guess you're right - 
here's a tarball". But they don't do community or SVN releases or 
anything like a company who "gets it".

> Look at the motive and heart behind the effort, not the license of the
> code they choose to use, to find the motivation and liklihood of
> contributions back, regardless of license.

I love the world your describe, really I do, but the GPL makes an 
honest partner out of the unenlightened (for values of 'honest' as 
recognized by GPL aficionados...).  It will be especially interesting 
to see how this plays out in the Sony case.  If everybody was making 
conscious, informed, and enlightened decisions about licensing then 
perhaps it would be a moot point, but until there are no longer any 
"here's some source - it must be public domain" types out there I think 
the GPL serves a good policy purpose.

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Mobile: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Pager: 603.442.1833
Jabber: flowerpt at gmail.com      Text: bill+text at bfccomputing.com
Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/