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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/Cautious_Cabinet_623 on 2025-09-02 14:19:34+00:00.
I was working as an architect of a specific technical domain in a fairly big company. I was young and idealist, and loved my work. You know, the type of guy who only accepts the job if the copyright and confidentiality part of the contract is changed to allow to develop open source. I had to use some closed components, but my hand was mostly free (after quite an amount of discussion, it was probably around the time when the term Open Source was born) to use free software.
There was a specific functionality which needed interoperability between different flavors of unixen (yeah, at that time Linux was considered unreliable and primitive, not the only unix which any sane tech guy even think of. I used it nevertheless, because in reality it was already better than the others), and all the implementations were either utterly unreliable or not interoperable. I have found an open source implementation with a BSD license which had the right specification… And also practically unuseable. I persuaded my boss that this is the right way to go, we should hire someone to fix it.
Remember, it was a big company, where every software project needed miles of red tape and at least 5kUSD. My boss said yes, so I wrote an email to the Linux mailing list of the country searching for someone doing it. A guy answered. He happened to be studying in the same university, where I came from, just one year younger (yes, I was that young as well). He knew me, but I didn’t remember him. So we talked, and he gave an offer. Of 100USD. I happily told it to my boss, who nearly got an instant heart attack. The boss told me that he is afraid this will be low quality, and the guy can ask for more, but make sure that everything is perfect. So I went back to the guy, and told him that. So we got a new offer. Of 250USD😁
So we made the contract. I put in that it should be delivered both as source code and as packaged for the unix flavors and Linux distros we use. I also put in that the source should be GNU GPL. If you can close a BSD software, you can open it as well, right?
The software was delivered and working great. But the maintainer of the software we fixed - and the BSD community in general - was not too happy. They said we cannot modify the licence. That we have stolen it. I said if closed vendors can change the licence, why we cannot. We gave credit where credit is due. Bazsi - the dev guy - said that he thought about how the internal structure of the software can be made better and he does not want conflict, so he rewrote the whole stuff from the ground up, making it even better in the process. It went so well that for a time it became the default package for the job in multiple Linux distribution, hence the market leader.
This is how syslog-ng was born.