Sam Ismail <dastar(a)wco.com> writes: *chuckle* Sam's been reading the propaganda again.... You've got companies making commercial use of FreeBSD and selling it to mainstream customers too. And you know what? They aren't bound by the GNU Public License to release (in some cases significantly modified) source to anyone under any conditions if they don't want to. Well, except for those parts of the typical stock FreeBSD system that are encumbered by the GPL. You might note that the FreeBSD folks have been careful to keep those separate in their source tree, and that it's possible to have a running OS without those parts: it's not much of a desktop user or development system but it'll get your packets where they need to go. Now that's something you can do with FreeBSD that you can't do with Linux -- derive your own work without having to make the source accessible outside your organization. Believe it or not, some commmercial concerns think that this will better protect their intellectual property, and in spite of what Stallman and some other folks might like you to believe that is sometimes the right way to go about it. ObClassic: this model's been around a while, it's how a significant portion of Wollongong's networking products worked. Though in those days you needed a Unix source license from Western Electric so you could get your hands on the BSD 4.[23] sources from which you could derive your own work, which in Wollongong's case was porting to other Unixes (and sometimes non-Unix OSs, like MPE). -Frank McConnell