why did RMS decide not to honor his commitment to "do no harm? [LWN.net]

why did RMS decide not to honor his commitment to "do no harm?

Posted Oct 2, 2006 5:24 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: why did RMS decide not to honor his commitment to "do no harm? by shieldsd
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

It's a shame, and it could have been avoided if "patch" will only be included when all interested parties agree.

Sorry, but this will never happen. "All interested parties" will never agree because any change will bring objections from someone.

And that's not how Linux kernel development works and you know it: what Linus said goes. If we have two USB stacks but Linus does not like them both - then USB stack written by Linus is included in kernel. No consensus. And the result is that some projects (especially embedded ones) are using 2.4 kernel still - because they disagree with changes introduced in 2.6 process. Sounds familiar ? Yup. Because it is.

Yet RMS decided to pull ahead on his own and added the DRM provisions.

...just like Linux wrote his own version of USB stack when he was unsatisfied by existion ones. Yup. RMS took a look on TiVo and found out that a user who needs changes in the system is no longer free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him and since it was the deal from the very start he decided to fix it. Linus claims that this crusage is not important and we shuld keep "tit-for-tat" principle embedded in GPLv2. The problem is: GPLv2 was never about "tit-for-tat" (Google, IBM or even "evil empire" Microsoft got to keep changes private as long as they keep binaries private). And the FSF was never about "tit-for-tat" - they clearly explained what the goal is many years ago.

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