Chad Dickerson Incidentally, when I wrote this week’s column (“Beyond Linux”), I wasn’t even thinking about the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, but using a non-GPL OS like FreeBSD certainly keeps you legally free and clear. The courts might conceivably be able to kill Linux, but not the whole idea of a free high-performance Unix-like OS.
The columns he references is worth a read: it’s interesting to observe how people are torn between wanting Linux or whatever to succeed but still want to keep it to themselves, like that band they saw in a club in their college days. What makes the tipping point between the unique and the ubiquitous? I’ve written about how I find FreeBSD more reliable, stable, and maintainable than Linux, and I’m glad to see someone with Chad’s visibility make people aware of their choices. Isn’t that what Open Source is about? His comments on how far Open Source databases like mySQL have come and how appropriate they are for many uses — buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about a startup I endured that spent hundreds of thousands on Oracle licenses for nothing more than the privilege of saying they used Oracle — are interesting. At what point do you need Oracle or SyBase?