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List:       userlinux-discuss
Subject:    [Discuss] drop userlinux go for userbsd
From:       Martin Konold <konold () kde ! org>
Date:       2003-12-15 23:57:26
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Hi Bruce,

thanks for your statement at http://userlinux.com/GUI.html explaining your 
decision as the Leader(*) with regards to GUI choice. While not fully 
agreeing with your rational I am accepting it as your personal opinion.

The reasons mentioned by you basically boil down to some non technical issue: 

"It is possible for us to make our system entirely royalty-free for solution 
developers, both Free and proprietary. This dictates some software choices: 
GNOME and PostgreSQL rather than KDE and MySQL, simply because of the way 
those products license proprietary developers."

In order to fully accomplish your stated goal I highly recommend to have a 
look at the BSD licensed operating systems and kernels!

Most of them support GNOME/GTK+ and PostgreSQL rather good and most users will 
not recognise the difference. You can even run most proprietary Linux 
software unmodified on BSD operating systems.

It is simply a fact that Linux does NOT allow for proprietary extensions / 
modules even if you are willing to pay a license fee. Simply ask Linus in 
this matter.

It is easy to imagine that a lot of of the solution developers aiming for 
royalty-free development of proprietary software can make much more use of a 
BSDish OS compared to the GPLed Linux.

If royality-free development of proprietary solutions is really the key factor 
when choosing OSS alternatives then Linux is simply not usable.

Choosing Linux as the base component for your project while ruling out other 
components which also don't allow for easy royalty-free development of 
proprietary solutions is bigotry.

Regards,
-- martin
(*) I have to admit that I was raised to be always suspicious about "Führer" 
people. I therefore think there is a reason why some OSS projects have 
neither a dictator nor a selfproclaimed leader.


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