Francis Earl wrote:
You say that as though you think IBM or Red Hat can teach Sun something
about giving away code. Sun being the largest single open source
contributor... (3x IBM, 5x RH,
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf,
pg. 51 - and that was before opensolaris, zfs, or the jdk). Perhaps you
imagine the tail is wagging the dog here.
It's funny, because if you take away OpenOffice.org/OpenSolaris they're
really done very little,
Take away OOo and no one would be using Linux on the desktop at all.
and no distros actually use Sun's OpenOffice,
they use Novells (go-oo.org) because Sun stiffles development too much.
That wouldn't exist without Sun either, and without Sun stifling anything.
Sun is proprietary Open Source unless it suites them - see CDDL for why
this is true.
That's a religious issue. I'm trying to be logical here.
Even in the case of NFS, I believe there was a BSD
alternative developing traction prior to its release.
Yes, but theirs mostly worked at release. I lost data and time to
several of the linux releases.
Until someone proves that device driver code is derived from one of the
OS's it can be used with and is not fair use of an interface it is all
speculation.
Umm, how do you suppose a driver work if it doesn't make calls into the
kernel? Using those functions makes it a derived work.
No it doesn't. If it did, SCO would have been right in their lawsuit
that things originally developed under Unix were owned by them (well, if
they had actually owned those rights anyway...). No one has ever proven
that this isn't fair use even in the general case, and Linux is
different in having a special exception specifically permitting that in
its copyright notice which would make it particularly difficult to prove.
I really have to wonder why even a small percent of OS users choose
something that goes out of its way to make things harder for them.
They use it because they don't want to allow others to continue making
it hard for them to make their own decisions. If people knew the types
of restrictions they instill on themselves by using proprietary
software, no one would ever use it.
Yet you are talking specifically about restrictions that you think
should keep them from using the software they want.
It is because of the vast amount of proprietary code that users are
forced to use things like Microsoft Office.
But it is the GPL restrictions that keep us from having competitive
alternatives.
Wait - did you say someone cares about users?
You're right, they should do it asap. It's not like there aren't open
source alternatives that are adequate. Personally I'm sick of hearing
that ATI and nVidia don't work with latest releases of software. If they
turned that over the guys developing that software, we wouldn't have to
wait.
It's funny that your concept of freedom requires you to tell other
people what they should choose and other companies what they should do.
And you are unrealistic about the quality and expedience of the open
source drivers. How long did it take to get a working firewire driver?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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