Re: Wanting opinions...

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 18:33 -0500, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> Theo is a nut, but he was probably not fully quoted in that article.
> It looks like Dan Lyons has a history of writing anti-Linux FUD.
> I'm kind of surprised that Forbes would put out crap like that.

Likewise.

Regardless of the circumstances, it's rather shocking when you see a
major publication get into gossip, rant, attitude and other non-sense.

I can understand some of the philosophy of De Raadt, Stallman, etc...
Heck, some of it could be traced back to the MIT-Digital-GNU v. Berkeley
UNIX developments, vendor and, total lack of vendor, alignments, etc...
Heck, we could even get into Sun, IBM, etc... on open standards, but
proprietary source.  Even Sun's Schwartz has a philosophy that isn't
that bad either, depending on how "open" you are.

But in reality, the BSD license, MPL and variant licenses, etc... don't
solve the _long_term_ issues that GNU/Linux has largely.  Yes, Linux is
based on a _lot_ of 4.4BSDLite code, but it's forked into largely GPL or
GPL compatible code that reallly tried to head off "leeching" with the
copyleft principle.

But in the end, these things are rather _detrimental_ to the _entire_
industry of _both_ "open source" and "open standard" as well as
"copyleft."  And it makes us _all_ look like asses.  Even I have really
tried to curb that amount of bashing I do without fully understanding a
situation over the last 12-18 months.  Especially when it's GPL.

In fact, despite all the anti-Sun rhetoric as of late, Sun still puts
out a lot more GPL and LGPL software than IBM.  IBM has largely been a
very small, limited amount of non-GPL, MPL-like.  Heck, even Sun beats
them there too.  So perception is often _not_ the reality.

Heck, people often overstate things about OpenBSD too.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith@ieee.org 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
It is mathematically impossible for someone who makes more than you
to be anything but richer than you.  Any tax rate that penalizes them
will also penalize you similarly (to those below you, and then below
them).  Linear algebra, let alone differential calculus or even ele-
mentary concepts of limits, is mutually exclusive with US journalism.
So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work.  ;->



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