Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 0:09 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

That must refer to companies like Netscaler that took stock (net?)bsd, added hardware, exotic packet filters, and user interfaces, then sold them for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The BSD projects tend to look at these as successes, but it sounds like the poster is claiming there's a problem. Would selling a binary-only Linux kernel module have been better? If so, how?

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 8:39 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I've never heard of Netscaler, but that's the kind of example that I am thinking of.

Again, it's a trade-off of short term versus long-term viability. BSD folks are happy anyone is using their stuff, which is fine, but I don't think it's worth it if the cost is getting code contributions back by the community.

It is in the long term that GPL helps. The example of proprietary binaries is a good one. Over time we see more and more companies moving away from this approach and moving towards actually releasing source code. The pain in the ass to users of having to target specific kernel versions, or not being able to use custom builds, and so on, is just not worth it. Network vendors get it, disk vendors get it, and even graphics vendors are starting to get it (Intel has for years, AMD is finally coming around, and... well, NVidia... never mind).

Sure a startup can whip up a proprietary kernel module and sell the fuck out of it until they can get bought by Google or Cisco or whatever their business plan is, but in the long run it's a costly solution.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 0:14 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

The whole Hadoop ecosystem, and pretty much all of the new container companies.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 7:18 UTC (Fri) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (2 responses)

Many container and cloud businesses are fully SAAS based. Because they do not distribute software, the "must provide source code when distributing binaries" part of the GPL does not apply. So, from that perspective it should not matter if their software was GPL rather than permissively licensed.

Still, Apache projects like Hadhoop seem to attract external contributions despite their permissive license. Isn't that quite counter intuitive to the rhetoric of copyleft proponents?

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 8:43 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know much (anything) about Hadoop or the culture. I will note that when I searched for "hadoop proprietary extensions" that the big hit was the one (!!) company, Hortonworks, that claimed to run without any proprietary extensions. This seems to indicate that while companies may give some things back, they hold back a lot too. I don't know what the balance is. Maybe it's a good one, but I still encourage copyleft licenses for long-term community building.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 9:22 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There are tons of proprietary extensions. As a rule, they eventually either get open sourced or get obsolete.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 8:33 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure. I work in DNS.

First off, lets start with the easy one: BIND. Proprietary versions of BIND are used by many DNS vendors, including those who sell modified versions (like Infoblox), those who run services based on modified versions (like Dyn), and those who build other products around the code-base (like F5).

But this also applies to other BSD-licensed DNS servers, like NSD and Unbound from NLnetLabs, which are also embedded into products (like Secure64).

It's not a leap to move on to DHCP software, which has similar problems, although customized versions of things like ISC DHCP are harder to spot, since they tend to be built into devices taped together in a few weeks by a code shop and put onto some embedded device that gets a single firmware drop and then is never updated on the wild Internet. (And honestly the ISC DHCP software should probably just be nuked from orbit, but nevertheless it would be nice if fixes and improvements were pushed back into the original.) It's harder to think about the actual costs here, since few products are sold as DHCP products.

That doesn't consider the truly big players: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung, and so on. I vaguely recall that Microsoft based it's IP stack off of the FreeBSD stack at one point. A quick search turns up this:

https://int80.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/microsoft-tcpip-op...

I'm sure there are tons of more examples. Feel free to post your favorite ones here. :)

In some sense I don't blame companies. If someone puts a sign up and says "free donuts, donate what you like" and you just take the books and don't leave any money... well, it's not very social but you're not doing anything wrong. But this is why I think that copyleft licenses are necessary in the long term - otherwise companies will just shit all over the commons.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 18, 2016 14:37 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

I think the point was that none of these cases are really examples of companies making their money off of BSD-licensed code, but rather from their own modifications and additions. After all, the BSD-licensed code they started from is freely available to the world, and they could hardly expect to make much money selling what their customers already have access to.

> If someone puts a sign up and says "free donuts, donate what you like" and you just take the books and don't leave any money... well, it's not very social but you're not doing anything wrong. But this is why I think that copyleft licenses are necessary in the long term - otherwise companies will just [ruin] the commons.

First, taking the books would be theft, since it was the *donuts* that were free... ;)

But more importantly, we're talking about an infinite supply of donuts here. Whether you choose to publish your changes or keep them secret, making use of code (BSD-licensed or otherwise) does not prevent others from doing the same. One could argue that contributing back would make everyone better off, but you certainly aren't making things any *worse*. Not contributing back may not be "social", but it isn't anti-social either. If using the BSD-licensed code at least means that your customers get a better product than if you'd decided to roll your own ad-hoc version, some good has come out of the arrangement. The commons isn't enhanced, but neither is it diminished.

If the license were copyleft instead, it *might* mean that the modifications are made available to the users—or it might just mean that the product doesn't exist at all, or that it exists but uses some idiosyncratic proprietary from-scratch implementation riddled with bugs and incompatibilities, either of which would be worse for all concerned than a version based on BSD-licensed code with some proprietary modifications.