This set of comments is so fantastic that I cannot let them disappear:

Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
by dougmc (70836) on Thursday November 20, @04:08PM (#7523262)
(http://www.frenzy.com/~dougmc) ... to port the NetBSD USB stack to osr5! They sure don't mind stealing open source when it suites them!
To be fair, the BSD license permits this. Is it really stealing if you accept something that somebody else gives you?
(Also, Microsoft has been accused of the same thing -- using *BSD code in their products. And as far as I can tell, this accusation is completely true -- but irrelevant, because it's not illegal or even `wrong'.)

I've always wondered why people who make embedded devices like WAPs and the like chose Linux rather than *BSD -- with BSD they don't have the GPL requirements to open up the source. If you intend to give out the source, fine -- use Linux -- but if you don't, it seems to be that one of the BSDs would be a better choice.

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Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
by KrispyKringle (672903) on Thursday November 20, @04:37PM (#7523526)
(http://www.radioactivechicken.org/)
I had the fortune to hear the CTO of RedHat give a speech. Afterwords, over refreshments (mmm...donuts), I asked him about this. `Why isn't it RedHat BSD?'
He said partly it was historical accident, but that there is also a good reason. He said something like, `Well, look at it this way. IBM recently pledged $1,000,000 to Linux (though where that money is I can't say). With Linux, we know that whatever they put into it will come back out. But if it were BSD, nothing would stop IBM from putting that money into BSD and making ``BSD+'' and not releasing the code. Here, we know we can benefit from what others put in without them closing it off.' I had to admit this was a pretty good point. To guys like you and me, it seems as if the companies get nothing out of it. But to the companies, the hard work of independent developers is just as important as their hard work is to us.

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BSD in Windows is a big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
by Spamalamadingdong (323207) on Thursday November 20, @05:00PM (#7523702)
(http://slashdot.org/)
To be fair, the BSD license permits this. Is it really stealing if you accept something that somebody else gives you?
(Also, Microsoft has been accused of the same thing -- using *BSD code in their products. And as far as I can tell, this accusation is completely true -- but irrelevant, because it's not illegal or even `wrong'.)

No, and yes. The user (whether SCO or M$) has no legal obligation, and thus can't be legally accused of stealing anything. However, on the moral level it's otherwise. Both SCO and Microsoft are trying to crush all competition in their respective niches, and their use of the same free software that they are trying to get rid of is grossly hypocritical.
This is why the GPL is better for the world than the BSD license; it prevents attempts to take the commons private, and allows much more rapid advancement of the useful arts. (If you think having to work around a minefield of patent rights is a problem for software, consider that patents expire 5 times sooner than copyrights do.)

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Re:BSD was in SCO UNIX? (Score:5, Insightful)
by joe_bruin (266648) on Thursday November 20, @05:03PM (#7523729)
(http://slashdot.org/~joe_bruin/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 02, @07:03PM)
i work at a company that makes embedded devices using linux, and i'll tell you why.
the real advantage is that we give up relatively little. sure, we have to give out the kernel source, but it's not like we ever owned that in the first place. we have to share most of our custom driver code, which arguably has some value, but we make our money selling hardware, not writing drivers. the advantage, however, is that we can grab patches and drivers from dozens of other companies that use the same cpu/flash/dac/video chip/... as we do. the gpl forces everyone to share their code, so we can take advantage of work done by other companies (and they can benefit from ours). for the "cost" of giving out a bit of our in-house code, we get the benefit of using the code from all those other companies for free.
while i'm a big supporter of the bsd license, there's no way all these companies (many of them our competitors) would release this code if they didn't have to, and our work would be much harder.