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GPLv3 - A Primer on Open Warfare in Open Source
savio13 writes "A BusinessWeek article about the GPLv3 starts to shed some light on where things are, and what the hold up is in getting the newest version out. They discuss the Stallman vs. Torvalds conflict, issues with DRM, the goal of 'one-stop licensing', and the ever-more-likely possibility that the newest version of the GPL just isn't relevant." From the article: "The impetus to make a profit (and its associated compromises) isn't sitting well with true believers in free software. And the resulting rifts were apparent at last week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco. On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight. On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too. Companies will just vote with their feet."
>And here is way - if it was true than Microsft and Apple should be calling their software "BSD/Windows" and "BSD/OSX"
And MacOSX used a BSD-like Kernel (Darwin) so why MacOSX is called MacOSX and not Darwin?
>The userland != the OS. The OS *is the kernel*
An operating system must allow you to operate with a computer with just a kernel like Linux you can't even boot the computer up to say nothing of operate with a computer. So a OS must be something more than a kernel, maybe that's also the reason why we have two names "operating system" and "kernel", because two different things need two different names.
> I could install the BSD userland on the Linux kernel, and it would still be Linux. "GNU/Linux"
No if you would take a BSD System and replace the BSD Kernel with the Linux than you would still have a BSD System and almost all users wouldn't even recognize any differences.
Or would you say that if you take the whole FreeBSD system and just replace one program, the kernel, that the system wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore but Linux? Even if all "Linux" user will soon discover that their new "Linux" will work different: other commands in the shell, commands with the same name has differnt options, software written for the old "Linux" will not compile on the new "Linux" because all the system libs are different, etc. And this should be the same OS?
On the other hand if i take a GNU System with the kernel Linux and replace Linux with the BSD Kernel (e.g. Debian GNU/kBSD) the user will discover non of this difference. And it's understandable because 95% of the OS would be still the same, only one program has changed, the kernel.
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Well hallelujah, that seems to come straight out of the GPL Bullsh!t Marketeze Generator. I mean, like "to give users the freedoms that Stallman set-out to insure existed in GPLed code" and "to run ever increasing sections of one's system on an open and modifiable platform", that's nice but not very specific, so dare I ask -you-, how does for example FreeBSD not do this? Does it restrict freedoms? Is it not open and modifiable? I name this OS because it uses the simplest of licences at the opposite end of the spectrum and does exactly what you just vaguely mentioned. The only thing I can come up with is that you cannot close it and redistribute under the GPL, so if you have any numbers on the equation of how many more contributions that deliveres minus the potential contributors one loses, I'd be grateful.