As we can read in recent news, VMware has become a gold member of the Linux foundation. That causes – to say the least – very mixed feelings to me.
One thing to keep in mind: The Linux Foundation is an industry association, it exists to act in the joint interest of it’s paying members. It is not a charity, and it does not act for the public good. I know and respect that, while some people sometimes appear to be confused about its function.
However, allowing an entity like VMware to join, despite their many years long disrespect for the most basic principles of the FOSS Community (such as: Following the GPL and its copyleft principle), really is hard to understand and accept.
Why hard to understand? The article explains the reasoning perfectly – this is the Linux Foundation, a commercially-focused industry group, which counts such noted open-source proponents as Oracle and Microsoft among their “platinum” members (by comparison, real Linux companies like Red Hat and Canonical are both “silver” members). VMWare isn’t exactly out of place here..
The Linux Foundation only cares about money.
I speak to people who are fairly close to its operations and the leaders.. and they all say… it’s all about money, forget principles or ideals or goals.
And they’re open about that. If you want principles and ideals, that’s what the FSF is for. But this is an industry group, representing all the companies with a financial interest in Linux.
It is pretty easy to cry out about principles for code you haven’t written. The FSF isn’t about code anymore: they have no control over linux (the kernel) and the userland is losing space against new projects like MUSL and LLVM.
The FSF doesn’t even have the power to relicense the GNU hurd to GPLv3, and nobody actually cares if they do. They are mostly irrelevant in the OS space.
Edited 2017-03-11 16:43 UTC
You mean people like Linus, he cares cares about ideals and goals but also about money and specifically about making the kernel a place where companies make business.
Is diverse. You Can’t compete there, Only With Closed, Black Boxes.