BSD was the edge that made Unix/TCP/IP the standard

BSD was the edge that made Unix/TCP/IP the standard

Posted Sep 4, 2006 9:40 UTC (Mon) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562)
In reply to: GPL is the big edge of Linux over the BSDs by dwheeler
Parent article: The future of NetBSD

Actually the only place where I see a use of BSD license is in creating things that are intended to become standards.

Like if the gecko (the html rendering) part of Mozilla, was BSD licensed. It would have allowed people in other companies to pickup the code into their browsers. And we would have seen that the html dialect followed by gecko would have become a standard. This was a mistake made by Mozilla.

Actually BSD license was very useful in the early days of Unix. The License made Unix API into the standard that it is today. Similarly Internet Protocol also became standard because of BSD license.

So no GPL is not the holy grail. You need BSD too. But it should only be used for interfaces that should become a standard. ie all development on IETF proposals should be in BSD.

Now that Posix is the standard and Linux is GPL any new interfaces that Linux adds will not become common or part of Unix standard. But that is not necessary now. I believe that Linux came at the right time when Posix was a decent standard. Anything earlier would not have made it very popular.

Actually the reason behind Apache is similar, because it also defines the standard for internet servers. Also the company is based around support rather than the code.

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