Quote of the week

[Posted May 16, 2007 by corbet]

It's quite amazing really at the same time as people are posting crypto keys everywhere in defiance of USSA law, we've got free software people trying to remove references to a piece of out of tree software, and one that is free software.

-- Alan Cox

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Quote of the week

Posted May 17, 2007 1:17 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (3 responses)

What does he mean by "USSA"?

Quote of the week

Posted May 17, 2007 1:24 UTC (Thu) by jello (subscriber, #6083) [Link]

He means the USA, in some areas, is about as free as the USSR was.

Quote of the week

Posted May 17, 2007 1:25 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (1 responses)

It could be a typo, or it could be a reference to the Soviet Union, which was the USSR.

USSA

Posted May 17, 2007 1:45 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

That's it - fairly common Cox usage.

Quote of the week

Posted May 17, 2007 15:45 UTC (Thu) by trutkin (guest, #3919) [Link] (3 responses)

What's the context of this disagreement?

Quote of the week

Posted May 17, 2007 16:25 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Click on the author's name link ("Alan Cox") to see the original mailing list post. Then click on "Thread" to see the entire LKML thread.

Context explained (My interpretation)

Posted May 18, 2007 5:09 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (1 responses)

Here's my take on the bigger picture of what's going on here. This is just my interpretation, so feel free to correct me...

Mathieu Desnoyers submitted a patch to the LKML to add (non-code) documentation explaining what the markers code submitted for inclusion into the kernel does. In the documentation, Mathieu mentions as examples several user-space programs, including SystemTAP.

Christoph Hellwig took exception to the inclusion of references to out-of-tree code in the documentation authored by Mathieu. Alan Cox then came to Mathieu's defense, and a brief (7 message) disagreement exchange occurred.

The "crypto keys" Alan refers to are presumably the 32-character AACS decryption keys used in hi-def DVD players, which various hackers have been plastering all over the Internet as of late, and the "USSA" appears to be a mildly satiric slant on the USA. Interesting way to label America, IMO.

I think the overall big picture is that Alan felt that Christoph's request seemed excessive, given that the out-of-tree code mentioned in Mathieu's documentation is itself FLOSS. And besides, it is poor documentation that unnecessarily adds layers of abstraction (using generic references) whilst describing software code functionality. Why not just come right out and mention concrete, real-world examples of how the code can be used?

Context explained (My interpretation)

Posted May 24, 2007 23:48 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

Because once a metaphore is exported from the kernel to an out-of-tree project, it has to be maintained by the kernel developers forever! Obviously SystemTAP should be brought into the kernel tree so that it can be adapted as the metaphore needs to change, duh, don't you listen to anything linus says? ;-)