Re: the beef [LWN.net]

Re: the beef

Posted Oct 2, 2006 23:17 UTC (Mon) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: the beef by coriordan
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

GPLv3 only influences hardware design in the rare case when the designer is looking for ways to prevent users from being able to tinker with the software. Less tinkering means less contributors. We don't gain from helping people who are trying to prohibit tinkering.

Do you realize that the only effect this will have on hardware designers is not the removal of DRM but the removal of Linux? That is what reduces the number of contributors. There's no DRM in use (or planned) where it's Linux that people desire. The only DRM i can see is where there's some body of content owned by someone else, not us, which content people actually want: pay-per-view content on the Tivo, console games, DVDs, etc. So please give me a single example of current DRM use where it's not some other people's (valuable) content that is being restricted, but purely free content.

So instead of growing the community, you are shrinking it. Furthermore, you are also isolating lots of users from being able to experience and understand the power of free software, because you are making it artificially harder for them to use the closed content they are interested in.

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Re: the beef

Posted Oct 3, 2006 1:09 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Do you realize that the only effect this will have on hardware designers is not the removal of DRM but the removal of Linux?

If the Linux kernel developers would prefer to subsidize DRM'ed hardware with their efforts, in order to gain more users and contributors at the expense of those users being about to modify the code, that is their choice. They can continue to use v2. (And anyway, it looks like they don't have much choice barring lengthy relicensing efforts.)

This is no different from the fact that GPLv2 does not eliminate all proprietary software. If you want to maximize the number of users and contributors to your code, use BSD.

Your double standard here is confusing.

Re: the beef

Posted Oct 5, 2006 19:48 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

> If you want to maximize the number of users and contributors to your code, use BSD.

Okay, I'll bite. How does the BSD maximize contributers?