iPhone restricts users, GPLv3 frees them

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Jul 1, 2007, at 8:56 PM, LuKreme wrote:

> On 1-Jul-2007, at 15:00, Charlton Wilbur wrote:
>> The GPL no more *caused* open source than the BSD license did;  
>> they were both part of the same movement, that arose for the same  
>> reasons;
>
> Yeah, I have to disagree there.  OSS as we know it didn't exist  
> before GPL and I don't see anything to convince me that it would  
> exist without GPL.

Disagree if you will; the historical record and the historical  
evidence are evident.

> What we would have is a core BSD that was free and a thousand  
> customized version of BSD that are not.  That's where it was  
> heading before GPL showed that you could have a complete OS that  
> was completely free of all encumbrances.

It wasn't the GPL that did that first, chronologically: it was  
386BSD, already well underway when Linus started his project,  
ironically enough, but it wasn't until the USL v UCB lawsuit was  
resolved and 4.4BSD-Lite was released in 1993 that it was determined  
that they actually weren't free of encumbrances; and while that was  
being decided in court, Linux had enough of a chance to establish  
itself in mindshare.

(386BSD, begun in 1989, released as the somewhat stable version 0.0  
in March 1992, and the more stable version 0.1 in July 1992; Linux,  
begun in 1991, released as the somewhat stable 0.12 version in  
January 1992 and the more stable version 0.96a in May 1992.)

Again, believe what you will, but the historical record shows otherwise.

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at gmail.com
cwilbur at chromatico.net