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Torvalds Takes Issue With De Icaza's Linux Desktop Claims
An anonymous reader writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds has poured scorn on claims made by the co-founder of the GNOME Desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, that he (Torvalds) was in any way to blame for the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives. De Icaza wrote in his personal blog: 'Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.'"
Update: 09/02 18:39 GMT by U L : The original source of the comments (and an exciting flamewar between Free Software heavyweights).
The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men. The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.
Linux does just fine without GNOME. Does it work the other way?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Free software is very much a threat to software engineers. See, we get paid to write software for systems. It's a nice gig. Gives me income to pay the bills. I'd much rather do this than be a ditch digger who hacks at software in my free time.
And guess what, we even use some free software. It's great, saved us some time and money. Thanks for that. And no, any changes made to it were NOT returned to the community. Know why? Because it's all owned by corporate the moment it's taken in. Yes yes, there's license restrictions. Guess what, it's not important because there's not really anyone owning that license to hold you to it. Especially if it's not advertised it's in use.
Why is this a concern, at least to us evil proprietary engineers? The more free packages incorporated, the less work that needs done. Less work = less employees. And in this economic climate, less employees also means less talented employees.
Software engineers have earned good money for decades. All this free stuff undermines that.
I think the problem is - even though you use it, no-one else does.
I do. My company does. Most of our customers do. The only times I see a Windows desktop these days are when I boot into it to play Guild Wars 2 (which does run on Linux but I don't have enough disk space) or when my girlfriend is loading files onto her iPod with iTunes.
See, would it really be that bad to have a stable ABI?
Stable ABIs are for retards. Stable ABIs force you to support cruddy old shit forever because it was poorly designed to begin with and now you can never get rid of it. Stable ABIs are what made Windows a steaming pile of bugs and security holes. Stable ABIs are the reason why, when I was writing Windows drivers, I had to intentionally ADD bugs to my driver to match bugs in existing drivers without which some popular applications wouldn't run.