ARTICLE: Free For All

[Thomas Mondoshawan Tate]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 12:24:19AM -0700, Jeff wrote:
> On Sunday 09 December 2001 12:41 am, you wrote:
> > Charles A. Reynolds wrote:
> > > 1.    Can somebody name an open source operating system without the word
> > > LINUX in it?
> >
> > Charles there are *tons* of open source operating systems besides Linux
> > the biggest proably being FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD (okay pretty much
> > anything that ends *BSD). but there are a lot of others.
> 
> Isn't BeOS Free?

Yes, but it's not free as in beer, and it's not free as in liberty, either.
Eg, all you're getting are the binaries -- not a drop of source has been
released, or ever will be (from what Jean-Luiss Gasse has said in the past).
The FreeBe download doesn't even come with source. Yes, BeOS uses GNU
open-source software for it's compiler and shell utilities, but that's about
where it ends -- none of the kernel source or server sources are available.

BeOS is commercial, closed-source software all the way, no matter how you
slice it.

-- 
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
mondoshawan@tank.dyndns.org
http://tank.dyndns.org