re:war [LWN.net]

re:war

Posted Nov 9, 2003 20:30 UTC (Sun) by vblum (guest, #1151)
In reply to: war by coriordan
Parent article: An attempt to backdoor the kernel

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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 :-)