war [LWN.net]

war

Posted Nov 9, 2003 19:28 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: Sounds like the Spanish civil war by vblum
Parent article: An attempt to backdoor the kernel

BitKeeper offers an immediate practical convenience on condition that we ignore the issue of freedom. If we accept this deal, will we ever have a Free Software SCM that rivals BitKeeper?
We didn't all accept the proprietary Qt. Now we have GNOME, and Qt has been GPL'd.

If Linus chose Arch, the whole community would have benefitted from increased developer interest in Arch. Maybe it would now have the features it lacks compared to BitKeeper.

BitKeeper is not a friend of the Free Software community. It's a friend to Linus, but Linus is not fighting for our freedom.

this here is software, not crimes against humanity!
The software divide between 1st & 3rd world countries is a humanitarian problem. Free Software is a solution.

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re:war

Posted Nov 9, 2003 20:30 UTC (Sun) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

errm ... just to explain my wording (crimes against humanity) - I wanted to put my own
example back into perspective, and only my own - nobody else had implied anything
remotely similar to Franco et al here, and I just wanted to make sure I could not be misread.
If my implication was that anyone else had - sorry about that.

I do see the freedom-related issues, but there must also be a path to get there; BK seems to
me a reasonable part of that path. Look at Qt vs. Gtk - yes, Qt is now GPL'd thanks to the
tireless pointing to the issue, and the world is now a better place for that. But - without
KDE, I highly doubt that Gnome would have taken off anywhere near the way it did - this
was a beautiful example of how creative competition can work.

If Larry's contribution ultimately ends up making Arch (or whatever else) a stronger system -
great. And if this can be done without hurting Larry's business in the long run (cause he
doesn't seem like a bad guy, and I'm sure he'll be happy to adapt if he can) - all the better.

re:war

Posted Nov 10, 2003 11:11 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Software was going proprietary, so RMS started GNU, Qt was proprietary, so he started GNOME, BitKeeper is proprietary, so he endorsed Arch and it's now a GNU project. It's true that solutions are born from problems, but I wouldn't use this as a basis for supporting the problem :-)