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A Sun engineer on LinuxA Sun engineer on LinuxPosted Sep 23, 2004 18:56 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)In reply to: A Sun engineer on Linux by ami.ganguli Parent article: A Sun engineer on Linux
For whatever reason, Linux has emerged as the dominent Unix-like OS, despite perfectly good competitors in the form of the BSDs. The BSDs meet all of the requirements that Sun has: they allow proprietary extensions, they follow a more controlled engineering process. The problem with the BSDs is precisely that: they allow proprietary extensions. If a company contributes something to one of the BSDs a competitor could grab it and instantly be on a level playing field with the original developer. And then they can make changes and not be required to feed them back to the BSD base. That can't happen with Linux. GPL requries the changes get fed back. So companies such as IBM feel safe investing in GPL'd stuff because it can't be easily used by their competitors to get a leg up.
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