Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 20, 2015 17:38 UTC (Tue) by jra (subscriber, #55261)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Del- wrote:

>> A part from that GPLv3 has made success in network routers, Linksys (yes that was Cisco, do they count as large you think?) even marketed it. Any NAS box these days come with Samba, does Hewlett Packard count as large in your book by any chance?
> Again, it's either isolated or used in non-core parts. Or in situation where GPLv3 has no bite at all.

So let me get this straight. You're saying that in a NAS box, Samba - the GPLv3+ SMB1/2/3 implementation that ALLOWS THE BOX TO FUNCTION AND IS THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THE PRODUCT is a 'non-core part'.

Hmmmm. I think you might want to look at the lifeboats. The argument is desperately listing and taking on water at an alarming rate :-).

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 20, 2015 20:56 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

That's exactly what I'm saying.

Your core part is something that you differentiate on from your competitors. For SAN the most interesting part is their core storage management which is far out of reach of GPLv3.

For end-user NAS boxes companies usually have no differentiating features at all (except the components price that you can get from your Chinese suppliers). So the vendors don't mind putting GPLv3 on them.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 21, 2015 16:09 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Looks like you're conflating "core" and "differentiate" there. SMB is a core feature for any kind of NAS storage box. Now, with Samba out there, it may be hard for vendors to differentiate themselves on it, so they have to find some other feature that differentiates them (which may also be a core, required feature for a NAS to have, but also need not be).

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 21, 2015 17:32 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

> Your core part is something that you differentiate on from your competitors.

Nope. That's your code *competency*, which is a business/management term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency.

The usual engineering interpretation of the term is very different, and more in line with the FEMA definition: https://www.fema.gov/core-capabilities. Basically a core "part" is something you *require* to achieve a goal, not something that distinguishes you from the rest.

At least that's how I see it.