Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

Posted Mar 21, 2011 5:59 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048)
In reply to: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line? by b7j0c
Parent article: Has Bionic stepped over the GPL line?

i'm not entirely sure why the open source community continues to rally to google's defense

I wouldn't say that it's "the open source community". In many discussions taking place on the Internet and in real life, there are voices like yours that criticize Google for what they're doing. There are also a number of apologists, but they aren't "the open source community".

That said, I agree with you it's strange that anyone from that community should rush to Google's aid at all. It calls into question whether certain people are committed to ideals and principles, or more inclined to take the "he's a [self-censored] but he's our [self-censored]" approach common in foreign policy (but not really in a values-based community).

Those who view themselves as advocates not only of open source but of free software (hey, @bkuhn) should certainly not have the attitude that software freedom only matters when someone actually sues...

I'm now going to do a post on what this approach here means with a view to proprietary loadable kernel modules, which is an example of the wide-ranging implications it might have if one supported Google's reprocessing and repurposing of raw kernel headers.

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