According to Michael Cobb: > >Ok Linux dude's and dudette's. If Linux is so open, how come ONE man owns the >right to the kernel and ONE man and his very few associates develop said kernel >
Not quite right ... Linus may closely control what goes into the official linux kernel tree but he does not own the copyright to all of it and is bound by the GPL terms as much as anyone else. If you are still concerned then maybe you should look at NetBSD or FreeBSD which have a significantly different development model. Note, I leave OpenBSD out of that crowd because that is fairly tightly controlled by Theo DeRaadt (Hi Theo, if you are listening :-) >How is this open? > This is open because you can get the source, modify it and redistribute it. >How is this ANY different that what the clowns in Redmond Washington do? > You _may_ be privileged enough to see some of the source if you go to the right M$ paeon larva hatchery - iirc, some universities have a limited source license for the M$ source but you cannot modify nor redistribute it, I don't think you are even allowed to discuss it with the non-blessed. >Whats to keep El Linux boy from caving and selling the rights to the linux >kernel for 10 Billion big ones? > The GPL and the copyright laws are the only thing that stop this. Linus could fork a non-GPL copy of HIS code and sell that off - he has every right to do this. He cannot sell off code that does not belong to him, given the number of people that have contributed to the linux kernel over the years I doubt if working out which code Linus actually wrote and which is contributed is nigh on impossible. -- =============================================================================== Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, BAE SYSTEMS =============================================================================== _______________________________________________ Firewalls mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls
