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Yup. The only working model

Posted Apr 22, 2008 0:15 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community by Frej
Parent article: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community

A democracy with no voting and judges that have no rules. Don't claim the linux model is a democracy then, it obviously isn't.

The linux model is obviously democracy. You don't even need 50% of votes to fork the kernel: 10-15% of developers will be enough. See: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc. So far Linux does not have significant forks - that means that system works. The fact that there are no known rules is advantage, not weakness. If you have written rules you have a way to game the system, but if the only way to get anything done is rough consensus it's much harder. Take a look on Microsoft's attack on two systems: IETF (no strict rules) and ISO (rigid structure with a lot of bureaucracy). First attack failed: after four years SenderID is still "an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community" and not "an Internet standard of any kind". Second attack succeded: now we have this huge mess called ISO/IEC 29500 standard.

Rules are means to speed up decision process, nothing more - when they are allowed to work as substitute for common sense bad things happens.

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Forking Linux? Fugettaboutit!

Posted Apr 22, 2008 1:15 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

You don't even need 50% of votes to fork the kernel: 10-15% of developers will be enough.

I just can't see the Linux kernel forking anytime soon. As long as Linus still maintains a presence, it would be impossible from a marketing perspective (not to mention a complete loss of credibility) to fork the kernel. After all, Linus wouldn't go "both ways" and actively maintain divergent forks, and having the "Kernel supported by Linus himself" as a sales/market pitch would certainly do little for the competing fork. Not that it couldn't happen legally (I'm thinking GPLv2 here), nor that it hasn't happened before (the aforementioned BSDs).

As for the parent comment by Frej, please understand that regardless of any "loaded" comments in the article with respect to how Linux is managed, the management style works because (1) Linus plays a big part of kernel development, even after almost 17 years of hacking Linux; (2) he is unusually skilled and talented at many aspects of operating system theory and kernel hacking, software engineering, and, most importantly, people skills (arguably the most difficult of these), and (3) he commands a great deal of respect because of (1) and (2). Whatever you (or the article) call it, the management style is what it is due to 17 years of continuous development. And, besides, ELC keynote speaker Andrew Morton works with Linus on a daily basis, so I suppose they know each other quite well.

Forgive me for all the Linus "gushing"; I've done it here on LWN.net before. But I still firmly believe that Linux owes much of its success to Linus' positive attributes mentioned above.

GPL ensues democracy, Linus make it work

Posted Apr 22, 2008 6:27 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's totally different question: why the democracy work. GPL ensues democracy - with or without Linus. Since you can not create proprietary fork the only reason to fork is if Linus makes bad decisions (BSD license, in comparison, allows democracy, not ensues it). And if Linus will make bad decisions on regular basis you'll see that this "Kernel supported by Linus himself" will quickly become moot point (see gcc/ecgs story, for example: forks like pgcc were frowned upon and rarely used till a lot of developers "voted" against FSF's rule). Now, it's true that Linus is enforcing some decisions - but so do "real" democracies (have you seen any where all decisions are made by votes of everyone?). They have government for everyday's work and even fundamental things like taxes are rarely voted by the "population at large".

Free software is a democratic institution because everyone have exactly one "vote" - it's just that this vote must be cast with your feet, not with your ballot. Unlike real life (where you'll be forced to change lifestyle and your spouse and kids will suffer) "vote with your feet" in virtual world only affects your work, nothing else - so it's proper vote. Proprietary software is, of course, planned economy: what the management says - goes. And as usual when resources are scarce and goal is clear planned economy work best (recall 20th years of last century in USSR and US) but when you have enough resources to try different approaches and don't have a clear goal... take a look on Windows Vista and Linux today...

Yup. The only working model

Posted Apr 22, 2008 13:13 UTC (Tue) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

>The linux model is obviously democracy. You don't even need 50% of votes to fork the kernel:
... So far Linux does not have significant forks - that means that system works.

Forking is individual freedom and not a form of government. Actually a key part of democracy
is that "majority rules", which is obviously >50%. I agree it's important that the possibility
of forking exists, as i wrote
"...As long as people are free to go their own way and leave(fork), it counters the arbitrary
power of maintainers for the specific project(with name)."


>The fact that there are no known rules is advantage, not weakness. If you have written rules
you have a way to game the system, but if the only way to get anything done is rough consensus
it's much harder. Take a look on Microsoft's attack on two systems: IETF (no strict rules) and
ISO (rigid structure with a lot of bureaucracy). First attack failed: after four years
SenderID is still "an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community" and not "an Internet
standard of any kind". Second attack succeded: now we have this huge mess called ISO/IEC 29500
standard.

Yes rules is always an complication. I don't disagree with this. The linux model has obviously
worked. But that doesn't make it a democracy.

My gripe was about the use of democracy as the true solution for all problems. If that holds,
then for linux to be a solution, we must argue that it is some kind of democracy.

Forks are out there

Posted Apr 30, 2008 18:27 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

There are a lot of forks that have existed for a long time (-ac, -aa), and some are still out there (-rt, -mm). Apart from explicit forks (called "trees", but diverging in substantial ways) there are distribution kernels, which are often maintained in a parallel state. And we can assume that there are large numbers of private forks all over, either experimental, outdated or temporary, but these are not "significant" as in your message.

If Linus went crazy and stopped merging new drivers while including OS/2 Warp code, people would probably switch to an externally maintained kernel. There must be excellent maintainers out there: every distro has one or more. This is not really a democracy except etymologically: power by the people, for the people.