Former Linux Architect Moves to Microsoft (eWeek)

Posted Jun 16, 2005 10:27 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> However, [there was the Zynot fork] and someone
> left to start their own distro because of
> accusations about Daniel Robbins, I started to
> feel really nervous. [T]hese kind of personality
> conflicts happen[,] but the nature of the
> accusations reminded me of the way M$ operates.

Interesting you should bring that up. Someone mentioned the Zynot fork
when I was researching my switch to Gentoo (from Mandrake), so I looked it
up and read the guy's posted statement, both the initial one and the later
followup. I came to ENTIRELY the opposite conclusion you seem to have
come to. The guy in question exhibited every sign of mistaking the man in
the mirror for Daniel Robbins -- it was /quite/ evident that he had all
the characteristics he was accusing Daniel of having -- from the guy's own
statement. In addition, both his history, and his stated goals for Zynot,
seemed to backup a conclusion that this guy didn't truly understand open
source or its dynamics in the first place, and was attempting to apply
rules that had worked in his previous closed source experience to the open
source community, where they didn't really apply, nor could they be made
to without destroying the very elements of open source that give it the
advantage it has!

Keep in mind, Daniel Robbins COULD have chosen a BSD style license for
Gentoo originated projects, allowing them to be taken closed source at his
whim. Or, he could have chosen something like the Mozilla Public License,
generally open but allowing one corporation (Netscape, in the original) to
take it closed. Instead, he chose the GPL, MUCH harder to take closed.

Now, one may note that the original Gentoo policy forced devs to sign a
contribution agreement yielding copyright to Gentoo Technologies, which
was NOT guaranteed to not go private with what they could. *THAT* was a
*VALID* criticism, one that has in general been rectified now, with
Daniel's departure and the creation of a not-for-profit Gentoo Foundation.
However, note that a simple copyright transfer policy in itself cannot be
considered evidence of ill intent to take things proprietary, unless one
ALSO considers Richard Stallman and the FSF guilty of ill intent to take
things proprietary, with their similar copyright transfer policy (altho it
does have a clause, I believe, that reverts the transfer if the FSF
licenses the work in a non-libre way).

However, back to the subject at hand, I really don't know what to make of
this, except that MS *HAS* offered some legit open-source work in the
past, if /only/ for tools that tend to support Unix to MS migrations, and
for previously Unix only tools such as network traffic capture (ethercap,
maybe? one of them, it's been some time since I researched it, back when I
was on MSWormOS myself and looking for an appropriate capture tool to
sleuth out what some traffic was that I was seeing). Further,
it's /possible/ if not /likely/ that the noises MS has been making
recently about making friends with open source are legit. I'm extremely
sceptical myself, but it's certainly possible that someone could believe
them, whether or not they actually /do/ turn out to be legit.

So... my judgement withheld pending further developments. He's an
extremely sharp guy, in any case. It'll be interesting to see if he
really /has/ gone over to the dark side, or if MS casts him back up like a
bad meal, or if, just /possibly/, MS has really desided (or elements in it
have decided) it must accept open source (and yes, libreware specifically)
as an on-the-ground fact, and must eventually deploy its apps on them if
it is to survive as a sizeable industry force. (I don't know if I'd now
consider MSOffice on Linux a good or a bad thing, advancing Linux, or
advancing the still-closed MSOffice monopoly to a new platform, but I can
see how they might see they need to do it, in any case, and wouldn't fault
someone from our community from joining them to see it happen,
particularly if they thought it'd benefit open source more than it would
perpetuate the MSOffice monopoly.)

Duncan