GPL-ed projects and politics
GPL-ed projects and politics
Posted Sep 23, 2006 17:48 UTC (Sat) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)In reply to: Bad, bad DRM by man_ls
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3
Other GPL-licensed projects (gcc, emacs) do a lot of politics and are wildly successful.
Maybe my different viewpoint comes partly from the fact that i'm right in the middle of these projects. The kernel has lots of dependencies on both gcc and glibc, so we follow them with great interest and we very much want those projects to succeed. Gcc has struggled for years (commercial compilers were leagues better) because it was developed in such a political way for a long time. When the egcs and pgcc projects threatened a hard fork it has been depoliticized and gcc got alot more contribution-centric, and it is in a much better technical shape now.
For glibc i suggest you read the following announcement from Ulrich Drepper (who has contributed most of the glibc code and who has been doing this for ~10 years), from August 2001. I'd suggest for you to scroll down to the section that starts with "And now for some not so nice things": glibc 2.2.4 announcement . (This was all of course eclipsed by the sad events of 9/11.)
This stuff definitely takes some digestion, and i dont expect you to take this from me at face value, because you do seem to (honestly) believe in the opposite, but doesnt it at least raise some doubt in you, which doubt would justify some more investigation and some more pondering?