His changes and development are on CVS, and he might want to make that public.(Q#4)
The Linux kernel is not on CVS and he's not going to put it on CVS.(Q#18)
CVS would not work for Linux (and for a lot of other projects) because with CVS you loose the semantics of a set of changes that a patch has. Imagine a patch that touches five files. If it's a patch it's one patch file that has the changes for all five source files. The entire change is contained in one place, even though it spans five source files. If you do that on CVS, when you commit the changes they turn to five individual changes to five files, and you have to hunt them down later if you want to undo them.
IIRC, that's one of the motivations behind BitKeeper and other newer version control systems.
This whole software patent thing stinks so much that it is not difficult to envision a future where even typing on a keyboard (manipulating via finger pressure a table with buttons that have symbols on top in order to enter information into an information processing device) or looking at the messages scrolling on the screen (visually gathering information of what is happening in the system via scrolling sequences of symbols on a display device) will be patented.
In that future, the whole patent business will be so huge that no one will be able to sue anyone without being sued back, by hundreds of small companies that derive their money solely by idea patenting and suing (sp?). The moment some company is bold enough to sue another, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon and sues the same company for their patents.
Can anyone say this will be a bright future? Guess not.
...and patent the idea of farting while pissing.
It's just as idiot as patenting the idea of editing numbers on my computer that happen to produce a recognizable sound when fed to a DAC.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't get it.
His changes and development are on CVS, and he might want to make that public.(Q#4)
The Linux kernel is not on CVS and he's not going to put it on CVS.(Q#18)
CVS would not work for Linux (and for a lot of other projects) because with CVS you loose the semantics of a set of changes that a patch has. Imagine a patch that touches five files. If it's a patch it's one patch file that has the changes for all five source files. The entire change is contained in one place, even though it spans five source files. If you do that on CVS, when you commit the changes they turn to five individual changes to five files, and you have to hunt them down later if you want to undo them.
IIRC, that's one of the motivations behind BitKeeper and other newer version control systems.
This whole software patent thing stinks so much that it is not difficult to envision a future where even typing on a keyboard (manipulating via finger pressure a table with buttons that have symbols on top in order to enter information into an information processing device) or looking at the messages scrolling on the screen (visually gathering information of what is happening in the system via scrolling sequences of symbols on a display device) will be patented.
In that future, the whole patent business will be so huge that no one will be able to sue anyone without being sued back, by hundreds of small companies that derive their money solely by idea patenting and suing (sp?). The moment some company is bold enough to sue another, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon and sues the same company for their patents.
Can anyone say this will be a bright future? Guess not.
...and patent the idea of farting while pissing.
It's just as idiot as patenting the idea of editing numbers on my computer that happen to produce a recognizable sound when fed to a DAC.