Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 8, 2010 21:08 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Two GCC stories by gmaxwell
Parent article: Two GCC stories

> Of course it matters: A large part of the incentive structure that
> improves our confidence that someone isn't planning on doing "bad things"
> is the fact that if you do bad things people with uniforms can come and
> lock you up and you know it.

So we shouldn't allow any developers from outside our current legal jurisdiction? No developers from bangladesh, the ukraine, brazil, malaysia, africa... Because even if you have their GPS coordinates, filing a complaint against them here in the US won't have Large Blue Men pounding on their doors any time soon.

Also, the lead developer on Gentoo Embedded is solar@gentoo.org, who put Ned Ludd in the real name field. That's not his real name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd

In that particular case, I have met him in person (after knowing him online for a few years, we got together at an embedded Linux conference), and it turned out he's actually male, which means he's not using the single most common reason for online handles. (Which is the same reason Val Henson went by "Val" for so long, and Pat Mochel went by "Pat".) There are parts of the net on which being obviously female attracts unwanted attention.

And no, linux-kernel isn't the only place that comes up:

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/5055...

As for the FSF, in the 1980's their high-bandwidth FTP site (provided by MIT) was their killer app, a unique resource that drew developers to them. Back then just about the only way for an individual to get online distribution for their code was to sign it over it to the FSF so they would put it up on their FTP site. (Which is why Larry Wall handed patch over to the FSF, back before he wrote Perl.) People were willing to jump through the copyright assignment hoops and put up with the extremist political rhetoric in order to get internet distribution for their code.

All that changed in 1993 when NSF changed its (AUP) Acceptable Use Policy to allow for-profit firms to connect directly to the internet, which allowed everything from home ISPs to companies like Yahoo:

http://landley.net/history/mirror/nsfnetaup.txt

And suddenly you didn't _need_ the FSF to distribute your code anymore, you could put it anywhere. And that's about when the FSF started a long slow downhill slide.

Linux didn't render the FSF irrelevant: Geocities did.

Rob

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Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 9, 2010 17:13 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You do realise that you devalue your own words as soon as you start describing the carefully reasoned arguments in the FSF's many articles as 'extremist political rhetoric', right?

(Your point about the FSF's FTP site stands, but not that well: there were many other high-bandwidth sites around even in the 80s with very large repositories of code on them. Much of that code was dramatically less free than the GPL or BSD licenses: oddly, nobody remembers most of that stuff anymore, while the GPL-licensed code soldiers on.)