4 ms·

I guess he makes a good point because he's saying that the standard APIs are a good thing and BSD should also focus on that to ease development for large projec

I guess he makes a good point because he's saying that the standard APIs are a good thing and BSD should also focus on that to ease development for large projects like GNOME and KDE. I can completely understand why systemd need their own timers as part of those APIs, I however cannot see the point of having their own NTP service. Maybe the old one was broken with systemd? But that's just one valid point, not being able to see the necessity of timesyncd does not invalidate the underlying goal of systemd, nor does it warrant moving to another distro. Because bottom line here, bsdmag is a BSD oriented zine so its focus is to promote BSD distros. I used to use 100% BSD 8 years ago but my migration to Linux is now complete. The BSD license in my opinion hurts open source more than GPL. There are three major examples that I can think of where big corporations have used BSD code to avoid re-inventing the wheel and piggybacking on open source. Microsoft when they used some BSD userland tools, Apple when they built OS X and Juniper when they made JunOS. I used to interpret these decisions as flattering, but they are in fact simply taking the code they need, with the license that allows them to do it. They would never take GPL code as freely because they would risk being locked in by its requirements.

moviuro 11y ago
Just about the timesyncd point: timesyncd is a client-only. ntpd was server+client together. Also, timesyncd uses a configuration syntax similar to units (services, timers, etc.)
hhw 11y ago
>I used to interpret these decisions as flattering, but they are in fact simply taking the code they need, with the license that allows them to do it. They would never take GPL code as freely because they would risk being locked in by its requirements. 1) Have you not considered that it was the intention of the developers of that code that it could be used in this way, without giving back? 2) Have you considered that the rest of the world benefits from the use of BSD code in Apple and Juniper products, even if they don't give any code back? Anyone who uses these products receives gets to use better code than what may have been written from scratch. 3) Apple and Juniper both give code back to FreeBSD 4) Even if they didn't, it does not hurt FreeBSD any to have companies use their code and not give anything back. 5) We're agreed that Microsoft, Apple, or Juniper would never have used GPL code in their kernels. So how exactly has the open source world lost out due to the existence of the BSD license?
- progman 11y ago
  > So how exactly has the open source world lost out due to the existence of the BSD license? iOS (based on BSD Unix) is proprietary. Android (based on GPL Linux) is open. iOS came first and seemed to be the huge winner. Then Google took GNU/Linux (GPL), built Android around it, and outpaced iOS by far. Now the BSD developers have to pay (!) for their own (!) developments when they buy idevices. They have no option to modify anything. They are just consumers. The Linux developers can take the code, tweak their devices (Cyanogenmod) and do a lot of other things with it. There is Android for x86 for instance. BSD is good for hardware producers. GPL is good for hardware consumers.

moviuro 11y ago

Just about the timesyncd point: timesyncd is a client-only. ntpd was server+client together. Also, timesyncd uses a configuration syntax similar to units (services, timers, etc.)

hhw 11y ago

>I used to interpret these decisions as flattering, but they are in fact simply taking the code they need, with the license that allows them to do it. They would never take GPL code as freely because they would risk being locked in by its requirements. 1) Have you not considered that it was the intention of the developers of that code that it could be used in this way, without giving back? 2) Have you considered that the rest of the world benefits from the use of BSD code in Apple and Juniper products, even if they don't give any code back? Anyone who uses these products receives gets to use better code than what may have been written from scratch. 3) Apple and Juniper both give code back to FreeBSD 4) Even if they didn't, it does not hurt FreeBSD any to have companies use their code and not give anything back. 5) We're agreed that Microsoft, Apple, or Juniper would never have used GPL code in their kernels. So how exactly has the open source world lost out due to the existence of the BSD license?

progman 11y ago
> So how exactly has the open source world lost out due to the existence of the BSD license? iOS (based on BSD Unix) is proprietary. Android (based on GPL Linux) is open. iOS came first and seemed to be the huge winner. Then Google took GNU/Linux (GPL), built Android around it, and outpaced iOS by far. Now the BSD developers have to pay (!) for their own (!) developments when they buy idevices. They have no option to modify anything. They are just consumers. The Linux developers can take the code, tweak their devices (Cyanogenmod) and do a lot of other things with it. There is Android for x86 for instance. BSD is good for hardware producers. GPL is good for hardware consumers.