http://floatingpoint.wordpress.com/2006/11/03/whats-really-happening-here
-------- The breakup: Pragmatists versus extremists November 3rd, 2006 Step back a bit and look at recent events. The GPLv3 fiasco, with HP and OSDL griping about FSF, and Stallman refusing to accommodate corporate types and trying to screw TiVo, among others; the Oracle move on Red Hat; the Microsoft move on Novell and Red Hat, which was sanctioned and even encouraged by OSDL (they were at the conference, and in fact were the ones who leaked this info to the press yesterday). Whats happening? The long-simmering tension between the two camps within Linux is now boiling to the surface, and the market is blowing apart. Richard Stallman and his band of merry anarchists have overplayed their hand with the GPLv3, and angered everyone on the other side of the table. By playing such a big role yesterday, OSDL, a vendor- and customer-funded consortium, was very publicly telling the Stallmanites: Bye bye. Crunchies versus suits. Extremists versus pragmatists. Collaborators versus the resistance. Open source versus proprietary. Stallman versus Torvalds. Religious crusaders versus business people. Call it what you want. These two camps have had an uneasy alliance for years. Now the breach is coming. It needs to happen. Both sides need to be rid of each other. The pragmatists can go forward with a great low-cost high-value operating system, building a platform on which to build a new ecosystem that can innovate and deliver value, creating a heterogeneous environment where proprietary code and open code can coexist. The crunchies can go back to screwing around with HURD and all those other little pieces that dont really work right, and they can all turn their copyrights over to Stallman and obey his every command and wait years and years for new features that still wont really work right; but at least theyll be able to sleep at night telling themselves that yes, even though their printer doesnt work right, and they cant open Powerpoint slides or run that video clip that everyone else is talking about, well, at least theyre still free. On behalf of everyone in the former camp, OSDL is saying to the Stallmanites: Please go away. Take your code and go back to your sandbox. Howl about Microsoft and have your little debates about freedom and file your little lawsuits over model train software and write your tricky little licenses that nobody understands, and let the rest of us get on with the business of running computers and writing software and making money. Please. Youve had your fifteen minutes. Now go away. -------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
