Mail Archives: opendos/1997/09/10/09:00:12
Pat Villani wrote:
>
> What are you all whining about? Didn't you read any of the
> announcements from Caldera? Did they ever promise to give you the
> source for the entire operating system?
Yes, they did. We are not "whining" about anything. We are merely
disappointed. Just as Caldera has every right to not release the full
source of OpenDOS, we have every right to be disappointed. The last
time I checked, we are still allowed to be disappointed, and let our
disappointment known to other people.
> Caldera _bought_ the sources to OD and then placed both binaries and
> some sources on the net. You didn't pay a penny, peso, lira, yen, etc.
> Yet, you think it is your right to demand the sources for it all.
> Frankly, you are all spoiled rotten.
Once again, it's not about money. Read the GNU GPL again carefully and
pay special sttention to the discussion of "free software".
And we are not "spoiled rotten". Think about it, who would benefit the
most by having the source of, say, FDISK.EXE freely available on the
net? I'd say it's the OpenDOS product, and indirectly Caldera. Most of
us could not use the source for any other purposes.
It is not like we don't know how to write FDISK ourselves. And it's not
like we don't already know the 8086 inside and out. We can program
efficiently without the source of OpenDOS. We can even do pretty well
without OpenDOS itself.
Without the source to rebuild OpenDOS, we are simply not going to use
OpenDOS at all. We could all spend our times to program ActiveX on MS
Windows NT/95/98, and let OpenDOS die!
Even if we are so keen on using source-less free software and save some
bucks, we could all download MS Internet Explorer!
> My question is: what makes you so special that Caldera, Linus Torvalds
> or myself should bend over backwards for you? You want free software?
> Then contribute your time to it. Support it. Contribute bug fixes.
> Make donations. You downloaded software from a commercial concern and
> didn't pay a cent for it? Be thankful that they made it available to
> you. Microsoft wouldn't give you the binaries for free, much less the
> full source code.
What do you think we are doing here? We all had our machines polished,
and hard disk refurnished, at the ready to contribute to OpenDOS!
Without the source, you tell me how am I going to contribute!
Once again, we could be hacking Linux, or Perl, or even Windows 95. We
don't gain anything if we can get the full source of OpenDOS today.
Caldera gains.
> Well, keep whining. Maybe Caldera will give in and give you the source
> to the whole package. Personally, it's attitudes like this that makes
> me sorry that I wrote free software in the first place.
Well, the world is divided into two camps. The free software camp with
GNU, Linux, Perl, etc. in it, and "all of the others" camp, with MS-DOS,
Windows, Netscape, Java, etc. in it.
Each side gives out something for free, for completely different
purposes. The free software camp seeks to improve the quality of their
software, hoping that some day, their software will be bug-free enough
and solid enough to over take commercial softwares. That's what
essentially happened to GNU and Linux. The other camp seeks to attract
programmers to program "to their propritory platform". Their product is
usually already of acceptable quality, and almost always a piece of a
bigger somewhat expansive bundle.
What we are trying to say is that there is virtually no hope that
Caldera will be able to compete in the second camp! It's not like Intel
is still mass producing the 8086!
--
Weiqi Gao
weiqigao AT a DOT crl DOT com
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