I have seen Torvalds being accused of backstabbing, too

Posted Sep 28, 2006 20:24 UTC (Thu) by h2 (guest, #27965)
In reply to: I have seen Torvalds being accused of backstabbing, too by robilad
Parent article: Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com)

Exactly. The person I trust less after reading through most of the threads on the GPL 3 debate is Linus, who clearly shows himself willing to do several things that do not help generate trust: be inconsistent in his tone, to a massive degree, jumping from near hysterical screaming on groklaw to near rational elsewhere, why he does this I don't really care, what I do see is that he does it.

The Tridgell example is a very good one to bring up, and shows clearly that he is a bit too willing to start on the downhill slope of compromise, without being willing to consider the long term consequences, or to listen to people who warned him about this potential.

And his refusal to address the potential issues of that particular decision until the situation blew up in his face does little to make me trust his ability to do any clearsighted long term thinking on the possible results of his actions and decisions. This alone should make people give some serious thought to just how much you can trust Linus to really watch out for even the restricted long term interests of Open Source software.

It is very fortunate for us that the GPL2 proved sufficiently strong to prevent Linus from making who knows how many other potential compromises he might have wanted to make over the past years, but which the license prevented him from making. And since from what I gather from the more clear headed comments here, the GPL 3 proposed text really only tightens that long term protection. For me it's very easy to see that the spirit, and implication, of GPL 2, definitely does not preclude the fact that all software must be able to run on some hardware by definition, so changes should not be able to deny real world running of the code, it just didn't make that point explicit enough.

The only thing I could accuse Stallman of is absolute consistency in his outlook, and more importantly, in his long term behavior. He believes what he believes, and he lives his life by what he believes. Personally, I respect that, since it's an amazingly rare quality in people. Others may choose to deride this is zealotry or whatever, but I'd like to take a very close look at those people's lives and decisions before I'd take what they have to say very seriously. Luckily we have that opportunity with Stallman, Moglen, etc, so we can all decide for ourselves whether we agree or disagree with their positions.

If people think living your life within a consistent set of ethical principles is a negative that says I think more about them than Stallman. Now you can disagree with Stallman and what he believes, that's quite easy to do, but accusing him of departing from core values over time is not something you can do unless you ignore reality. So I'd say, if you trusted Stallman with GPL 2, very little has changed in him or his outlook when it comes to GPL 3, except that he now can see areas that he could not anticipate in GPL 2.

By the way, I'd like to thank Mingo for at least admitting that he is merely 'trying' to communicate the reasons for the disagreement. In my case, I have to admit that the effort has failed, I have not seen any particularly convincing arguments put forth by the kernel developers. But I do applaud the effort to at least try to be rational, which is more than I have seen from Linus, whose opposition seems to stem from personal dislike of the FSF and Stallman more than any other single factor, no matter how he tries to whitewash this.

I still trust Linus and the core developers to do the very best job they can do on the kernel code, and I trust that it will continue to improve over time, that trust hasn't changed at all, and I hope they continue with their great work. What has changed is that I no longer trust them to foresee events that might end up severely compromising even the freedoms given by their open source vs/ free software beliefs.