I disagree entirely. [LWN.net]

I disagree entirely.

Posted Apr 12, 2007 16:32 UTC (Thu) by leoc (subscriber, #39773)
Parent article: How not to handle a licensing violation

I think this is exactly how a license dispute should be settled. Since humans are involved, there will always be emotional political disagreements (and BSD vs GPL is a classic), but the lack of lawsuits in this conflict demonstrates the superiority of the free software model. Contrast this to the proprietary software industry, where multi-year lawsuits over copyright, patents, and other so called "intellectual" property are the norm.

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I disagree entirely.

Posted Apr 14, 2007 17:20 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]

...but the lack of lawsuits in this conflict demonstrates the superiority of the free software model. Contrast this to the proprietary software industry, where multi-year lawsuits over copyright, patents, and other so called "intellectual" property are the norm.

You do realize the only reason for the lack of lawsuits is the lack of money involved, not because of some fanciful moral high ground we somehow occupy, right? If there was anything to gain besides our egos we'd be right down there in the mud with them.

I disagree entirely.

Posted Apr 16, 2007 19:08 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

And that demonstrates the superiority of the free software model, in that it reduces the incentive to have long drawn out lawsuits.

I disagree entirely.

Posted Apr 17, 2007 21:14 UTC (Tue) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

There is plenty of money involved here. Linux and BSD systems are widely used, and are collectively worth billions of dollars in infrastructure. The ongoing "ownership" of the code bases behind these systems is worth a lot of money to a lot of people, which is why companies like IBM, Sun, HP, etc spend a lot of time participating in the open source community.