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The FSF, Linux's Hit Men
PrimeNumber writes "Forbes has this story about the Free Software Foundation and its quest for Cisco and Broadcom to release the source of GPL'ed linux source used in routers. Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this. However it did help me gain insight into software from a PHB and suit perspective."
Remember "What SCO wants, SCO gets"? Same author. Don't expect any love from him.
OK, I did RTFA, and it is mostly bashing.
For months, in secret,
If LKML, KernelTrap, Slashdot, and Newsforge stories all qualify as secret, that is.
I don't know about "controlling" the licensing. They wrote the license, Linus and various other project maintainers chose to use the license. There is not much "control" to be wielded here. Open is open.
The first actual statement of fact in the article, even though "threats" might be a bit of a stretch. Moglen was quoted farther down that all of his conversations had been ammicable and that a resolution would probably be reached without going to court. That doesn't sound very threatening.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
If you look at other articles that Daniel Lyons has written for Forbes, you will see that this man is more or less anti-free software. He wrote an article back in June about SCO vs. Linux. In that article he describes linux users as: "like many religious folk, Linux-loving crunchies [are] convinced of their own rightousness..." This is just another article written by a another man who thinks that Linux will go nowhere because it isn't backed by a major corporation starting with an M.
It's my personal opinion not to read too much into the article, and take it just as it is, an opinion -- someone else's view on what is happening.
You've obviously never worked with Cisco. Cisco wants to sell you everything. Repeatedly. Look what happened to the guys that ported Linux to a Cat 6500... they now work for Cisco and the code never left the building. If end users could recompile "IOS", Cisco loses a substantial source of income -- even if most people wouldn't know what to do with the source, someone would and that'd be the end of Cisco getting paid for their development. (In my opinion, Cisco has done such a piss poor job of development and testing in recent years, "open source" couldn't do any worse.) Cisco makes great hardware (and always has), however, their software just makes me want to shoot someone -- really, what the f*** are they testing?!
:-)
As a company, "we" once toyed with the idea of loading our own code on Linksys hardware (it's simple really, even before the whole GPL BS.) But that didn't make it past the lawyer(s)
PS: Cisco is terrified of all the old, "obsolete", "used" hardware floating around. And with all the failed dot-coms, there's tones of it available. Some of it never came out of the box/off the pallet. It might be several years old, but it works perfectly (2500's, 5000's, etc.)