Who is doing harm here?

Posted Oct 5, 2006 12:58 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: Who is doing harm here? by man_ls
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

Indeed. I would like to commend Ingo and stevenj for their contributions to this thread, which have clarified a number of things for me at least. The whole thing has been pretty civil as these things go. I do now at least understand a bit of why the kernel devs are so grumpy.

But I do not find myself convinced by their arguments, and agree with stevenj that the fears of forking, 'legal strongarming', and 'acting with legal but not moral authority' are overblown.

Nevertheless, Jon Corbet put it well (as ever) in the original article. This debate _is_ causing strife, and there is thus quite a lot to be said for a v3 that only has the uncontentious stuff in it. That would be a pity - the FSF are the ones who are being consistent and 'in the spirit of', and the kernel devs who are being awkward (IMHO), but it is quite finely balanced as to which course would be better in the long term.

We certainly won't be able to say that the issues have not been discussed fully at the end of it all, whatever happens - and that of course, is a good thing - tiresome as it might seem right now.

So, to re-iterate. Thank you for those making an effort to dicuss the substnative issues (which is nearly everyone here). It is appreciated.

Who is doing harm here?

Posted Oct 9, 2006 17:01 UTC (Mon) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

In my opinion, the difference is that the FSF is thinking about freedom in a multi-generational timeframe, and the kernel devs want success/market dominance *right now*. And they appear willing to trade off freedom to get it.

If you think about it from the perspective of tens or hundreds of years, Linux is not that important; it's essentially the early scaffolding for a great cathedral of code. But, unlike the real multi-hundred-year cathedral projects, I don't think these scaffold builders are even aware that a cathedral will ever exist.

The FSF is right not to bend on this issue; if we want truly free computers, it's incredibly important. Eventually, GPLv3 code will be such an overwhelming presence that it would be insane to try to compete with it in any but the smallest niches.

If, however, the foundation is flawed, the cathedral may collapse. The architect has identified flaws in the design, and is redrawing the blueprints. The scaffold builders are upset about this. Either the cathedral won't look quite how they thought, or they think their project IS the cathedral.

The most popular free kernel, a hundred years from now, may even be called Linux, but it will be related to today's kernel only in the sense that modern man is related to the chimpanzee. But the GPLv3 may very well still be in force. Law, especially good law, lasts a LOT longer than code.