On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Alan Cox wrote: <snip> > > > This is a free software project not a business enterprise. > > > > And the same principles apply, don't they? We seek to minimise overhead > > and to use our kernel development hours as effectively as we can. > > One word if we are getting into the economics of this: Externalities. > There are lots of benefits from merging the code beyond simple value of > code merge including more developers, more reference code, more users. > The ratio of new contributions to maintenance is a different problem and > one I do not think should be conflated with it. > > But yes I do think they are different - free software is largely done for > fun, by people who want to contribute. What was it John Betjeman said of > another large volunteer project: > > "the result of the independent spirit which still survives in this > country and refuses to be crushed by the money-worshippers, centralizers > and the unimaginative theorists who are doing their best to kill it" > > Alan to interject, and in response to a variety of posts in this thread and in no way drawing solely on yours, alan: despite that it may sound like some interesting viewpoints are getting aired here, i think the discussion may've unproductively slewed to a point where andrew's unfortunately been painted into a corner in which he has little practical interest. it seems like some folks have misinterpreted andrew's remarks as being variously inflexible, elitist, "political", pro-"corporate-drone", working at cross-purposes to the spirit of open source, and otherwise. in rereading the thread, though, he's pretty much been the most even-handed, moderate, practical, and open to discussion and compromise of anyone involved. he gave an opinion about the merits of OMFS in-kernel vs FUSE, clarified his stance, remained open to other's comments and criticism, didn't rise to any bait when people called his ideas "stupid" and whatnot (despite that he specifically said he had "no strong opinions either way"), and he compromised: he offered to pull the code into -mm; he said he'd merge v4. known: OMFS has a few bugs (thanks, reviewers), needs testing, and has outstanding legal questions to resolve. andrew offered to merge the next version. to ground the topic in terms of practicality: what else would all of you have andrew do, at this moment, that he hasn't already done? can we let him get back to work? thanks, d . -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
