"The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time?
I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-02-05
Thanks for the edits. I really wrote the whole thing off the top of my head, so some parts weren't completely accurate.
Stallman has nothing against commercial software.
You are right, although a bit pedantic. I was describing the process that took place, which was commerce taking over what had before that been almost entirely academic.
The thing is, by the 80s, UNIX geeks were already a breed apart. I lumped them in with the academic crowd there which isn't accurate. The point I was trying to make is that while the FSF were approaching businesses and institutions, they were pretty much getting laughed out the of the building. But you are right, GNU did have a following, especially emacs which was the de-facto coding tool on unix environments for a very long time.
IMHO, this is a cop-out. HURD itself has been in development for almost 20 years now with no usable version in sight, and it was the second try for a GNU kernel. While a micro-kernel is more difficult then a monolithic one, it isnt THAT much more difficult.
If read all the CatB stuff (I forget exactly which essay he talks about it), ESR says that the open source methodology was started in linux, and others who used it successfully were unconsciously copying things that Linus did. What happened with CatB is that it moved from the unconscious to the conscious. If you really want me to find the exact quote I will, but I am basing that statement on what he wrote.
KDE calls itself Free NOW, but that is because of all the Qt drama when it started. GNOME was specifically started as a Free alternative to KDE, and had strong times to GNU. And of course GNU is free, it is the OS made by the FSF. What I am referring to is what ESR said when he was describing the whole birth of Mozilla thing. He said a few weeks after the term Open Source hit the wild, so web searching showed far more adoption then he had anticipated. I was into mucking with Apples back then, so I can't say from personal experience.
Now there's some egg on my face ;-) Like I said, I wrote that off the top of my head, and it has been a real long time since I was reading through the FSF materials.
I have made a different experience. Most people don't care about how you develop software but they understand the role of computers and software in today's world and the ethical questions which arise out of them.
Well, quite honestly, most people don't care about either, and use linux because it is a cool way to "stick it to the man", and is free as in beer. These people are more or less leeches, but they make up a nice percentage of the user base. Typically, when someone around me is using Free and Open interchangeably, I try to briefly describe the difference between philosophy and methodology. The people I run into lean more towards the practical, but it could be where I live and who I talk to.
You see, I didn't even know that.
I will point out though that while they may say they support the FSF, they do not follow their principals. Most of those companies do not completely Free all their assets, which is what the FSF says is right. Most of what you listed release source code where it makes sense, and keep the "crown jewels" closed, as ESR describes in The Magic Cauldron. That and while I have been in business meetings where people are discussing open source, the only context I have ever heard FSF morality preached to me is in forums like these (or LUGs, which is sort of the same thing)
Not the software should have freedom. But people should have freedom who depend more and more on computers and software to participate in the digital society/culture, to learn, to work, to communicate, etc. Also government and economy should have freedom by controlling their IT infrastructure. That's the important point!
It amounts to the same thing, a corruption of the word Freedom. Freedom for a guy to hack on a program in his basement is not the same thing as the charter of human rights. It doesn't even remotely come close.
There is a huge difference for a government to say "we demand open formats and protocols for our infrastructure so we will not be reliant on a single business" to saying all source code not given away is wrong. Free software works for stuff like transport protocols or server software, but it falls apart for real commercial applications. The vast majority of advancements in digital image creation and manipulation have been done by adobe, which would simply not exist in a Free Software world. Same thing with sound, DAWs would be at an even lower level then they are in Linux if it weren't for proprietary software. Games would be at the zork level.
What I am saying is that when you bring morality into what is essentially a discussion about practical issues, you end up painting everything black or white. Like it or not, corporate innovation deals with things that academic innovation would never really consider a priority, and by removing commercial incentive, you are basically killing the software industry. And while there is a difference between commercial and free, removing any ability for a company to protect their investment in R&D makes it amount to virtually the same thing. The only way for it to be worthwhile is for software to be used to sell something else, which still means there is no software industry.
Member since:2005-07-15
>You are right, although a bit pedantic. I was describing the process that took place, which was commerce taking over what had before that been almost entirely academic.
You made the same mistake again. Stallman had no problem with "commerce taking over what had before that been almost entirely academic" he had a problem with making software proprietary.
That's not pedantic, that's an important difference.
Being Free Software or proprietary software is a question of licensing. Being commercial is a question of development environment.
Free Software can be commercial (RedHat, Sun, IBM,...) and non commercial (Debian, KDE,...). Proprietary software can be commercial (Windows, MacOS,..) and non-commercial (all the freeware).
Stallman has something against proprietary software whether it is commercial or non-commercial and he accept all Free Software whether it is commercial or non-commercial.
>HURD itself has been in development for almost 20 years now with no usable version in sight, and it was the second try for a GNU kernel. While a micro-kernel is more difficult then a monolithic one, it isnt THAT much more difficult.
But it has a low priority since about 15 years because a lot of good free kernel already exists.
That's one of the advantages of Free Software, you don't have to reinvent the wheel again and again. If you have a wheel use it and go on doing something different.
>KDE calls itself Free NOW, but that is because of all the Qt drama when it started.
During the "Qt drama" it was neither complete Free Software nor complete Open Source so it make no sense to talk about this time.
>Well, quite honestly, most people don't care about either, and use linux because it is a cool way to "stick it to the man", and is free as in beer.
I talk a lot to computer users most of them don't use GNU/Linux at all. And while they don't care about any development strategy they understand quite well the dependency of society, economy and government on software and the question who should have control over this cultural technique (fyi it was Bill Gates who called software a cultural technique and he is right!)
>I will point out though that while they may say they support the FSF, they do not follow their principals. Most of those companies do not completely Free all their assets, which is what the FSF says is right.
They don't do it because their main interest is in making the most money. But that doesn't mean that they don't move into the right direction (e.g. look at sun, it is just great to see them moving). Also if they would agree to your rating of the FSF they wouldn't support them.
>It amounts to the same thing, a corruption of the word Freedom. Freedom for a guy to hack on a program in his basement is not the same thing as the charter of human rights.
But the freedom to participate equally in humans (digital) culture, the freedom to learn, study and work. To have control over your daily life/business which depends more and more on software. etc.
But we disagree completely on this topic and i have no interest in getting into this topic again and again. At least in the form of comments on a news portal.
>Like it or not, corporate innovation deals with things that academic innovation would never really consider a priority, and by removing commercial incentive, you are basically killing the software industry.
You make again the mistake creating the "commercial vs. academic" argument which is neither my argument nor the argument of Stallman or the FSF.
Software is needed everywhere and as long as software is needed we have customers and as long as we have customers you will find someone who take the job. Free Software could even boost the software industry because we wouldn't have a market with few large monopolies but a real free market.
PS: It is also interesting to read what Bruce Perens (one of the founder of the Open Source term and the OSI) said 1 year after starting the "Open Source" term: http://groups.google.de/group/muc.lists.debian.user/msg/c8001c56bdf...
Edited 2007-08-22 23:06
Member since:
2005-07-15
>Way back in the day when software began to get commercialized,
It doesn't become commercialized, it become proprietary.
Stallman has nothing against commercial software.
>and attracted a few followers on campuses, but made next to no headway outside of the academic setting.
In the 80s GNU was really famous, especially in the proprietary Unix world. Almost everyone installed this great and free GNU software on top of their proprietary Unix.
>they were never able to get their kernel to the point of even being usable, let alone fully functional.
They choosed a far more complex architecture for their kernel so that Linux was faster ready to use. With Linux beeing ready to use there was no need for another kernel so that the GNU kernel become the lowest possible priority and the GNU project focused on other missing parts.
>Eventually, he wrote a paper on it called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which basically layed out in detail the rules and style of management that Linus had inadvertently created when he brought help in to develop Linux.
It was not only Linux, other projects used the same development strategy. It is also interesting to know that the first releases of this paper spoke about Free Software. Also Netscape was inspired by a version of this paper which spoke about Free Software.
>Virtually overnight, all kinds of projects that had been calling themselves Free Software, started to identify themselves as Open Source.
I can't see that. The largest part of the base system comes from GNU and all this projects call themselves as Free Software and not as Open Source. Also other important projects like KDE and many more call themselves Free Software.
>For the most part, people use the two words interchangably, and while they will buy in somewhat to the five freedoms and all that,
its 4 freedoms!
>when you really explain the free software philosophy to them, they will side more with the practical then the religious side of things.
I have made a different experience. Most people don't care about how you develop software but they understand the role of computers and software in today's world and the ethical questions which arise out of them.
>As it stands, the FSF is still pretty much ignored by the people who matter in the Linux community. [..] The open source methodology however, mixes wonderfully with corporate involvement, to the point where massive pillers of the industry like IBM, SUN, Novell, and Apple are all following the principals Eric Raymond published in his CatB papers.
I disagree. A lot of the important projects are GNU projects. And other projects like KDE also federalize themselves with the FSF. The same is true for companies. Just look at the list of supporters of FSF and the other Free Software Foundations there you will find names like Google, HP, IBM, Nokia, Intel, JBoss, Nec, Cisco, Samsung, MySQL, Sun,...
>Not only that, but saying that software has freedoms just like people demeans the whole idea of what freedom is.
Not the software should have freedom. But people should have freedom who depend more and more on computers and software to participate in the digital society/culture, to learn, to work, to communicate, etc. Also government and economy should have freedom by controlling their IT infrastructure. That's the important point!
PS: Because you said that Free Software and the FSF is pretty much ignored by important people in the GNU/Linux world I can't resist in citing a important person of the Linux (the kernel) world, Alan Cox (said to Eric Raymond): "That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term 'open source' also did the decent thing and died out with you."
Edited 2007-08-22 21:41