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Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek)
For the curious, here is how
BusinessWeek sees the GPLv3 process. "At a panel at LinuxWorld,
[Eben] Moglen described the process as nothing short of a massive community
looking deep within itself and answering the lofty question: What does
freedom mean? It's a very open-source way to solve a problem; only unlike
fixing bugs in a code, there's no easy answer and big divides that are hard
to bridge. 'It's an unusual activity,' Moglen says. 'It's more about the
development of the society and less about the software license.'"
(Log in to post comments)
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 21, 2006 14:13 UTC (Mon) by alexbk (subscriber, #37839) [Link] "If Torvalds chooses not to go with version 3 [of the GPL] for Linux, the Free Software Foundation will become even more irrelevant to the business world of open source." -BusinessWeek
Ugh, I thought BusinessWeek had more clue than that.
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 21, 2006 15:43 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] Yup. It's not actually possible for the FSF to become more irrelevantto the business world at this point, and the decision's already been made. :)
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 21, 2006 16:12 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Of course the GPLv3 will be used for *nothing* in a modern Linux distro, and the FSF produces *nothing* the business world uses. Absolutely.
Except for, oh, GCC, the GNU toolchain, and a huge mass of utilities without which your average Linux distro would be useless. (Yes, busybox can replace some of these, but I don't see it replacing the toolchain anytime soon: and the toolchain is *crucial*. And busybox's target is the small: it's intentionally specialized. But, hell, I don't have to tell *you* that. ;) )
(On top of that, there isn't really a cohesive 'business world' entity that things can become relevant or irrelevant *to*. When people refer to that they really mean 'the herd behaviour of fad-following managers', and, well, I don't see what's interesting about that, and it's certainly true that that herd behaviour has little connection to e.g. actual technical merit. After all, if that wasn't true, everyone would be using busybox ;} ;) )
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 23, 2006 17:28 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] You didn't mention the biggest one: glibc, which is linked into every single application on a typical Linux-based system. It's LGPL, not GPL, but it's due to get the same DRM language in its license: you have to be able to install a new C library, and if you can change that, you can almost certainly blow holes in the DRM.For embedded systems, there is an alternative C library, newlib, which is BSD-licensed, so the Tivo folks can use that.
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 23, 2006 19:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Well, actually I was poking rather unjustified fun at landley a bit: he*is* the busybox maintainer, after all, and thus closely affiliated with uClibc as well. :)
But your point is entirely valid. DRM stuff pretty much must be
yawn...just the usual kernel/OS confusion Posted Aug 21, 2006 21:06 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] The article gives every indication that the authors don't know the difference between the kernel, which Linus wrote, and the rest of the operating system (as the term is commonly understood, i.e. including userspace).
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 21, 2006 23:45 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] 1/3 of the .c files in Linux, including about 1/3 of the drivers, already have the "or at your option any later version" language in them.
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 21, 2006 23:57 UTC (Mon) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link] dmarti,
If you choose to go with citing facts about Linux, you will become even more irrelevant to the correspondents and editors at Business Week.
;-)
Open Warfare in Open Source (BusinessWeek) Posted Aug 24, 2006 23:32 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link] So what happens when some of the kernel developers start submitting GPLv3 or later. Will Linus reject the code?
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