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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems
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To: JC Jaros who wrote (20093)9/21/1999 6:54:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins  Read Replies (4) of 64865
 
IANAL - But my understanding of the BSD license is that you may take the product, change it, and redistribute it in binary-only form without releasing the source or the changes you've made. You may also charge for the redistribution, so you can effectively take *BSD and make it a commercial product. There used to be an advertising clause in the license that said you would have to attribute Berkeley in any advertising for the product, but this clause has recently been removed.

So, theoretically MSFT could make a branded version of BSD (BSDWindows?) and sell it, possibly coopting it to make their version compatible with the Win32 API or some other type of change. I doubt that this would happen anytime soon, because they would then be competing against themselves and their own NT product in the server marketing space. You would probably have to see a dramatic failure of Win2000 (both technically and in sales) before anything like the above scenario would ever happen.

I'm also not sure that I would view a MS/BSD as a bad thing. It would be a step closer to open standards by having MSFT offer an OS with better POSIX/UNIX compatibility, GNU utilities and compiler, etc. But who would buy such a thing? You would give up the strategic advantage of source code and the right to change it. MSFT would have to offer something very compelling to convince anybody to use an MS/BSD instead of the "real thing".

-Mitch
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