Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Posted Sep 25, 2006 5:01 UTC (Mon) by zorgan (guest, #4016)
In reply to: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3 by BrucePerens
Parent article: Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Well, RMS has the best crystal ball of anyone I know. He sat down in the early eighties and envisioned a lot of what would go wrong today.

True, its fantastic how right he was, and especially his creation of the GPL was amazingly innovative and successful. But that doesn't mean that he is always right, and in fact IMNSHO he has been wrong often enough. (Think: cathedral...)

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Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Posted Sep 25, 2006 13:01 UTC (Mon) by pinky0x51 (guest, #40742) [Link] (1 responses)

>he has been wrong often enough. (Think: cathedral...)

Can you explain this? What exactly do you mean?
"cathedral" reminds me only on "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" but that has nothing to do with RMS, that's Eric Raymond's thing.

Kernel developers' position on GPLv3

Posted Sep 28, 2006 17:25 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

One of the arguments behind Cathederal and Bazaar that has been lost was how development around FSF itmes seemed very insular around Boston. The Emacs/Xemacs and the gcc/ecgs forks were due to a very Cathederal take that the FSF had over its own software. The HURD/Linux "fork" was also an example. HURD was built as a cathederal and had many incarnations that booted but didn't cover everything that the people wanted back then to show. Linux booted but barely had a user environment and it went out the door.

Talking about Linux to RMS was a "forbidden" topic where one would get a nice letter chastising people over using something that was taking away effort from FSF goals. He never answered my question when I could get a bootable HURD to test this stuff with. After a while the stern lecture about hurting FSF got replaced by saying that Linux had to be called GNU/Linux.

So when ESR originally wrote C&B he was talking about how the Linux development model was better than the closed door FSF model. FSF has changed a lot since then.. so you get better access to their snapshots and stuff