Also, GPL applies to end users. As you pointed out only as it relates to liability. Not relating to permission to USE. I don't understand you. My reading of that clause in the GPL indicates that you can't use the program unless you agree not to hold the author liable for the harm it may cause. And that is what the MS-PL seems to be saying. Let me rephrase the question. How do the MS-PL and GPL differ in the rights of the end user? If you see any difference please post in a detailed manner instead of concise legalese.
Most of the people submit licenses for certification that are used on genuine open source projects. The MS-PL is submitted in a vacuum - anything using it is hypothetical at this point. OSI knows that a certified Open Source license does not guarantee an open source project, and they depend on the goodwill of the participants. Depending on the goodwill of Microsoft is somewhere between naivete and insanity. They failed to design the license definition to avoid misuse, and they are trying to make up for it by ignoring their own definition.
No one expects lots of software to appear under the BSDL with no source available. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to expect Microsoft to offer MS-PL licensed software with no source and loudly trumpet how much Open Source code they distribute. Your ideas are interesting but they are also flatly wrong in this case. There's a ton of code out there which is MS-PL'ed.
The AJAX tool kit for one . After reading the license, click on the source code tab to look at the actual source code.
It is not, it covers usage, not just distribution or modification. You are not permitted to USE this software if you do not accept this license. I have pointed it out elsewhere in this thread, but the GPL does regulate usage to the same degree as the MS-PL. Read the MS-PL and then this relevant portion of the GPL:
In no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
How does the MS-PL restrict usage any more than the GPL?
If MS-PL is OSI approved it will be the only OSI approved license that restrict usage of software covered under that license. One of the core elements of Free Software is that (normal) users are not restricted. So for compliance, MS-PL restricts usage and it thus not compatible with the idea of Free Software.
Are you sure? The OSI don't even list that as one of their objections.
From the GPL
In no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
If you read the MS-PL you will find that it does not regulate usage of the software any more than the GPL.
That is almost the only place in the license which talks about usage of the software. Apart from that, can you point out where it applies to a end user(except for the waiver of express guarantees)? The rest of the license talks about distribution.
Also, GPL applies to end users.
From the GPL
in no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use the program (including but not limited to loss of data or data being rendered inaccurate or losses sustained by you or third parties or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if such holder or other party has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Raytracing comes under a class of problems that are embarassingly parallel. Want to render 2 million(~1920x1020) pixels? Send them to 2 million processors(cores) simultaneously and get results back. This is possible because there is rendering each pixel is independent of rendering another. Note that all the data required(like textures, lights, etc.) should be available to all the processors, so SETI style high latency computation is out of the question.
What makes it interesting is that the gigahertz race is done with and has turned into a "core" race. Intel was already showcasing 80 cores on the same chip. A few cores dedicated to Phong shading algorithms and radiosity and the rest to ray tracing would simply overshadow the current raster rendering. Also, raytracing is mathematically elegant and simple compared to all the dirty tricks employed by current graphics technology so it should make programmers' lives easier(unlike the Cell processor which is a nightmare to code for).
Another reason why I don't want Aero is I do a hell of a lot of RDP'ing and you can't get Aero over RDP Aero runs on RDP when both the client machine and remote machine are Vista machines with Aero enabled.
Well, most people don't know what partitioning is.
I think his point was that you could keep user friendly defaults while giving flexibility to the power user. For example, you could have the automatic option as default and have 'Guided' and 'Advanced' options for the power user. I think that's what most distros that I have installed did.
Once again, new linux users won't know the names of all the programs they might want. Ubuntu installs what I consider a reasonable selection. Talk of knowing exactly what is installed sounds more like server talk, for which you probably want Ubuntu server, which does install a much smaller selection of packages by default
Again, it's the same thing, provide a option(not selected by default), to choose packages. Again, this is how it was done in most distros i have used. User friendliness is not always in conflict with configurability.
Page 3 is about security, and once again tha author seems clueless to me. An "intruder" on a default Ubuntu system can pretty much by definition (due to the lack of running network-interfacing daemons) only be a local attacker with physical access to your machine.
Wrong. A buffer overflow in Firefox can be the attack vector. As can be a hole in any internet facing software that use internet data (Synaptic, FreeAMP, Media players) or even applications that open any files(if GIMP has a vulnerability parsing JPEG files, even JPEG files could possibly result in a "intruder" gaining access to your machine(not root access though, unless you run GIMP as root).
Have you tried writing an app to run on the Xbox without paying licensing fees/royalties to Microsoft?
The majority of consoles lose money on hardware(atleast in the first year of sale). Hence the restriction makes sense because people get their hardware for less than what it actually costs to make it. What they gain in price is lost in the lack of freedom to run your apps for free.
On the other hand, the iPhones makes a tidy profit on the sale(and is not subsidized like all other unlocked phones sold by carriers out there) and tries to collect more money monthly from the consumer. That is the difference.
Your post fits the very definition of a Ad hominem attack. Just read it again to see how much substance it has, and how much it contributes to the actual thread and discussion on hand.
Slashdot is a discussion forum. I am commenting on the article's topic. Comments on articles are a medium to exchange opinion, strident or not. The linked articles in the summary are political in nature and hardly technical and "steer clear of mentioning any real technical details and focus mainly on personality issues, to the extent that they seem to see the LKML as some kind of soap opera".
If you want articles and discussions on your terms and hold strident opinions on discussions that you think we need you hear about, I suggest you start your own discussion site. You are allowed to switch to another discussion forum if it better suits your needs. Slashdot will probably struggle on without you.
Note: I am only replying to this AC post because it has been modded up and because of it, my +5 informative GP has been reduced +4 by a "- troll" moderation.
Very interesting! This "recoiledsnake" guy (parent poster), up to this point, was a thinly masked Microsoft apologist:
Those who don't follow the Slashdot groupthink == Microsoft apologist?
He was slamming OpenOffice
Pointing out OO's deficiencies is slamming it? Is it a perfect piece of software?
He was flaming Apple users
I was correcting a mistake in the parent's post.
He was downplaying an article about a boot sector virus on a Windows Vista laptop
Read again. I did nothing of that sort and was adding relevant information to the parent post.
And now, after a long history of Microsoft-centric and Microsoft-friendly comments, he is suddenly pretending to be an expert in Linux kernel matters...
You mean one cannot make Microsoft-centric while being an expert in Linux kernel matters? As part of a OS course I once wrote a Linux filesystem driver which ran in the kernel. I have installed and run RedHat Linux, Mandrake, Gentoo, SuSe, Ubuntu, Debian and a few more. My thesis included writing a program that ran on Windows, Linux and OS X. These days I work with C# and ASP.NET. I once toyed with writing a Linux sound driver for a Soundblaster card but someone else did it first and I lost interest. I currently dual boot Vista and Ubuntu and use a FreeBSD shell.
So, maybe, just maybe, someone can be well versed in the Linux kernel as well as MS technologies? Or is it a black and white thing with no shades of grey and us vs. them?
...giving a deceptive and incorrect account of what happened. (He even got moderated to "Informative". I expect to be modded me down for this - dont spare me.)
Note that you cannot pinpoint any misappropriations in my post. I even asked readers to correct my account if they can, because I may not know all the facts. And nice job on the "Mod me down..." line. Atleast a couple of moderators have fallen for it.
Read this if you are curious about the true story of why and how Con Kolivas quit kernel hacking:
LWN.net article
Written by long-time Linux kernel observer Jonathan Corbet.
That article does not say that the only reason for him quitting was the swap pre-fetch. It was just that Con announced his departure in a discussion related to it. I am sure swap prefetch was a small fry to him compared to the whole scheduler issue.
Could this really be Microsoft PR in action? Is Microsoft trying to plant false grass-roots "history" via such deceptive postings? Seeing that they cannot win via technology in the marketplace, is Microsoft now trying to attack the credibility and integrity of Linux kernel developers?
OMG IT'S A M$ SHILL.BURN HIM!!!! Needless paranoia. Where is the false grass-roots "history" that I have planted? And no, this is not Microsoft PR in action. The closest I was to Microsoft was when I was in Seattle to attend a Amazon interview for a C++/Linux position. Also, nice use of the question mark. Reminds me of Jon Stewart's take on FOX News in this very entertaining video .
Did you even read the article that I linked you to?
But the fact is that if you can get a newer kernel running pretty damn well on old hardware, it heavily suggests that the "heavy iron" argument is a load of shit.
So your does your Pentium 233MHz "router" with Linux on it run KDE, Gnome or Compiz? The kernel is customizable to the extent that unneeded things can be stripped out. But it is not support for RAID that slows down desktop performance, it is about algorithms in the kernel. You can't customize them that easily without breaking other things, I suggest you read other posts on this article.
And the reason that there is no current need for forking is not that a "customizable kernel is that if you want to do something like use old hardware for specific purposes, or want to develop an embedded system, that you can create a kernel that is optimized" but that even Linus was convinced that the customizability was NOT enough for desktop usage and hence decided to make fundamental changes in the kernel which solved the issue which couldn't be solved by simplistically optimizing it.
Using pluggable schedulers would only be justified if the single scheduler were forced to incorporate some fundamental tradeoffs that weren't acceptable to all users. That obviously hasn't happened: CFS and SD are both better than the previous O(1) scheduler all-around. Neither scheduler sacrifices desktop performance for server performance, or vice versa.
I think the point of a pluggable scheduler would be so that *future* enhancements can be tested, benchmarked, tried out and deployed without either blessings from kernel devs or messy patches that need to be kept current between releases of the mainline. Is there no chance of a better scheduler than CFS coming along at all? The argument makes sense only if the pluggable scheduler causes excessive compuational or administrative overhead.
Nice revisionist history there.
No one has provided any evidence that it is better for desktop stuff, the current/new scheduler has included a lot of patches which fix all the old problems it may have had. People are bitching because they have no lives and love to bitch, controversy gives meaning to their lives probably.
Con Kolivas actually sat down and wrote benchmarks for the express purpose of people who demanded proof. He not only bitched but also had patches that did the talking. The "current/new scheduler has included a lot of patches which fix all the old problems it may have had" is actually based on the work of the "People [who] are bitching because they have no lives and love to bitch, controversy gives meaning to their lives probably."
As far as I can tell, this is more BS about the scheduler. So much BS that Linus has decided to swap out the old O(1) scheduler for the CFS. Go figure.
Is it the CPU scheduler? If so, you're a liar. Nobody had produced repeatable benchmarks that show a significant shortcoming in CFS for desktop and gaming use. Uh? Has the kernel with CFS integrated even been released? Also, Roman sort of differs wtih CFS being "perfect". Read the whole thread here .
I read your post twice and still can't decide if it was veiled sarcasm or if you're serious.
Re:Well that's the beauty of Linux...
on
Fork the Linux Kernel?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Can you, or this blogger, or anyone, site some actual evidence that shows what the fuck "optimized" even means?
You know, you guys go around spouting stuff about how Linux is too serveresque, but no one so far as I've seen has even defined that. A decade ago there might have been something to the complaint, although I can tell you now that I can take a Pentium 233mhz and turn it into a router running the newer kernels, and have it run like a hot damn, so I think you, like some other folks, are just spouting ill-conceived crapola.
Huh? Cite what? Have you been living under a rock? Even Linus knows the issues involved and hence is moving to CFS in the latest kernel.
The issues are complex, so no wonder your oversimplications and silly anectodes fail to make the cut. As for actual evidence, read about how Con Kolivas set about doing exactly what you asked here . Also I think you should read the CK mailing lists if you really want to get into the nitty gritty details.
Why not try to keep yourself informed instead of accusing others of spouting crapola? Or maybe everyone should take your word and stop trying to improve Linux because you "can take a Pentium 233mhz and turn it into a router running the newer kernels, and have it run like a hot damn"
That is a gross over-simplication of what happened and almost qualifies as revisionist history and brushing things under the carpet. Let me summarize my understanding of what happened and someone please correct me if I am wrong.
Con Kolivas had been shouting from rooftops about slow desktop performance and was submitting feedback and bug reports. One of the kernel devs apparently said "I do not notice the issue on my quadcore machine with 4GB RAM". Rightly or wrongly, this lead Con to believe that the kernel devs do not care about desktop performance and only give priority to issues that big corporates complain about.
In the true open source style, he took upon himself to learn kernel programming and released a whole set of -CK patches and various versions of benchmarking tools and schedulers. On the other side, Ingo Molnar was the maintainer of the scheduler portion of the kernel and maintained that the O(1) scheduler(and the one before it?) is good enough and has no problems. Con conclusively started proving this wrong with his benchmarks. At this point, everyone assumed the -CK branch would be merged into the kernel at some point and Linus says he had been considering it.
At some point, Ingo starts making his own scheduler, which later evolved into the Completely Fair Scheduler. A number of posts claim that it was kind of rip off of the ideas behind Con's scheduler with which it was in a race to get included in the kernel. Then Linus decides to include CFS into the kernel instead of Con's scheduler. The reason he gave was that Con thought SD was perfect and that he ignored and flamed the users on the CK mailing list and that he(Linus) was far more comfortable working with Ingo since he knew him well. He also admitted that he might have formed this opinion on a single incident on the mailing list and he didn't have the time to follow the CK mailing list.
Some people on Con's side in the LKML tried to explain this by saying that the single incident was in response to a troll who submitted faulty bug reports and ignored the reasons for why they were rejected and that Linus was playing favorites. Con couldn't take the non-inclusion of -CK and plugsched(which would have given users a clean way of using a custom scheduler) and quit kernel development totally.
The latest twist in the story was reported on Slashdot here . The gist of it was that another hacker(Roman Zippel) was trying work on CFS. He had asked questions about what some parts of the code did, and also made some patches that considerably simplified the code and mathematically proved his patches made things better. In response, Ingo came out with a big patch that ripped out the code that was questioned and included Roman's Zippel's ideas(another rip off?) with hardly any discussion and a tangential acknowledgement of including his changes. Roman complained that talking in patches without explanation is detrimental to collaborative OSS development.
Your examples totally miss the point. The CPU scheduler is a *lot* more crucial to desktop performance than swap space, memory config etc. etc.
Have you even been keeping up with the whole CPU scheduler in the kernel issue that the article mentions?
The whole point is that the CPU scheduler is NOT modular and you cannot change its behavior by much by changing kernel options. Con(along with soemone else) made patches to make it modular, calling it plugsched, but it was nixed from getting into the kernel by Linus who said something on the lines of "The scheduler is not something you see frequent changes in."
Con wanted it because desktop users can easily plug his desktop-centric scheduler into the kernel. For a lot more details read here .
How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? Atleast they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, it's a EULA ?
The AJAX tool kit for one . After reading the license, click on the source code tab to look at the actual source code.
SLI and Crossfire are parallel at the frame level and not at the pixel level.
Raytracing comes under a class of problems that are embarassingly parallel. Want to render 2 million(~1920x1020) pixels? Send them to 2 million processors(cores) simultaneously and get results back. This is possible because there is rendering each pixel is independent of rendering another. Note that all the data required(like textures, lights, etc.) should be available to all the processors, so SETI style high latency computation is out of the question.
What makes it interesting is that the gigahertz race is done with and has turned into a "core" race. Intel was already showcasing 80 cores on the same chip. A few cores dedicated to Phong shading algorithms and radiosity and the rest to ray tracing would simply overshadow the current raster rendering. Also, raytracing is mathematically elegant and simple compared to all the dirty tricks employed by current graphics technology so it should make programmers' lives easier(unlike the Cell processor which is a nightmare to code for).
I think his point was that you could keep user friendly defaults while giving flexibility to the power user. For example, you could have the automatic option as default and have 'Guided' and 'Advanced' options for the power user. I think that's what most distros that I have installed did.
Once again, new linux users won't know the names of all the programs they might want. Ubuntu installs what I consider a reasonable selection. Talk of knowing exactly what is installed sounds more like server talk, for which you probably want Ubuntu server, which does install a much smaller selection of packages by default Again, it's the same thing, provide a option(not selected by default), to choose packages. Again, this is how it was done in most distros i have used. User friendliness is not always in conflict with configurability.Wrong. A buffer overflow in Firefox can be the attack vector. As can be a hole in any internet facing software that use internet data (Synaptic, FreeAMP, Media players) or even applications that open any files(if GIMP has a vulnerability parsing JPEG files, even JPEG files could possibly result in a "intruder" gaining access to your machine(not root access though, unless you run GIMP as root).
The majority of consoles lose money on hardware(atleast in the first year of sale). Hence the restriction makes sense because people get their hardware for less than what it actually costs to make it. What they gain in price is lost in the lack of freedom to run your apps for free.
On the other hand, the iPhones makes a tidy profit on the sale(and is not subsidized like all other unlocked phones sold by carriers out there) and tries to collect more money monthly from the consumer. That is the difference.
Apple gets a share of the monthly bill of the iPhone customer. Some sources peg it at $9/month. So they indeed care about unlocking.
Your post fits the very definition of a Ad hominem attack. Just read it again to see how much substance it has, and how much it contributes to the actual thread and discussion on hand.
Slashdot is a discussion forum. I am commenting on the article's topic. Comments on articles are a medium to exchange opinion, strident or not. The linked articles in the summary are political in nature and hardly technical and "steer clear of mentioning any real technical details and focus mainly on personality issues, to the extent that they seem to see the LKML as some kind of soap opera".
If you want articles and discussions on your terms and hold strident opinions on discussions that you think we need you hear about, I suggest you start your own discussion site. You are allowed to switch to another discussion forum if it better suits your needs. Slashdot will probably struggle on without you.
Those who don't follow the Slashdot groupthink == Microsoft apologist?
He was slamming OpenOfficePointing out OO's deficiencies is slamming it? Is it a perfect piece of software?
He was flaming Apple usersI was correcting a mistake in the parent's post.
He was downplaying an article about a boot sector virus on a Windows Vista laptopRead again. I did nothing of that sort and was adding relevant information to the parent post.
And now, after a long history of Microsoft-centric and Microsoft-friendly comments, he is suddenly pretending to be an expert in Linux kernel matters...You mean one cannot make Microsoft-centric while being an expert in Linux kernel matters? As part of a OS course I once wrote a Linux filesystem driver which ran in the kernel. I have installed and run RedHat Linux, Mandrake, Gentoo, SuSe, Ubuntu, Debian and a few more. My thesis included writing a program that ran on Windows, Linux and OS X. These days I work with C# and ASP.NET. I once toyed with writing a Linux sound driver for a Soundblaster card but someone else did it first and I lost interest. I currently dual boot Vista and Ubuntu and use a FreeBSD shell.
So, maybe, just maybe, someone can be well versed in the Linux kernel as well as MS technologies? Or is it a black and white thing with no shades of grey and us vs. them?
...giving a deceptive and incorrect account of what happened. (He even got moderated to "Informative". I expect to be modded me down for this - dont spare me.)Note that you cannot pinpoint any misappropriations in my post. I even asked readers to correct my account if they can, because I may not know all the facts. And nice job on the "Mod me down..." line. Atleast a couple of moderators have fallen for it.
Read this if you are curious about the true story of why and how Con Kolivas quit kernel hacking: LWN.net article Written by long-time Linux kernel observer Jonathan Corbet.That article does not say that the only reason for him quitting was the swap pre-fetch. It was just that Con announced his departure in a discussion related to it. I am sure swap prefetch was a small fry to him compared to the whole scheduler issue.
Could this really be Microsoft PR in action? Is Microsoft trying to plant false grass-roots "history" via such deceptive postings? Seeing that they cannot win via technology in the marketplace, is Microsoft now trying to attack the credibility and integrity of Linux kernel developers?OMG IT'S A M$ SHILL.BURN HIM!!!! Needless paranoia. Where is the false grass-roots "history" that I have planted? And no, this is not Microsoft PR in action. The closest I was to Microsoft was when I was in Seattle to attend a Amazon interview for a C++/Linux position. Also, nice use of the question mark. Reminds me of Jon Stewart's take on FOX News in this very entertaining video .
And the reason that there is no current need for forking is not that a "customizable kernel is that if you want to do something like use old hardware for specific purposes, or want to develop an embedded system, that you can create a kernel that is optimized" but that even Linus was convinced that the customizability was NOT enough for desktop usage and hence decided to make fundamental changes in the kernel which solved the issue which couldn't be solved by simplistically optimizing it.
I think the point of a pluggable scheduler would be so that *future* enhancements can be tested, benchmarked, tried out and deployed without either blessings from kernel devs or messy patches that need to be kept current between releases of the mainline. Is there no chance of a better scheduler than CFS coming along at all? The argument makes sense only if the pluggable scheduler causes excessive compuational or administrative overhead.
Con Kolivas actually sat down and wrote benchmarks for the express purpose of people who demanded proof. He not only bitched but also had patches that did the talking. The "current/new scheduler has included a lot of patches which fix all the old problems it may have had" is actually based on the work of the "People [who] are bitching because they have no lives and love to bitch, controversy gives meaning to their lives probably."
I read your post twice and still can't decide if it was veiled sarcasm or if you're serious.
Huh? Cite what? Have you been living under a rock? Even Linus knows the issues involved and hence is moving to CFS in the latest kernel.
The issues are complex, so no wonder your oversimplications and silly anectodes fail to make the cut. As for actual evidence, read about how Con Kolivas set about doing exactly what you asked here . Also I think you should read the CK mailing lists if you really want to get into the nitty gritty details.
Why not try to keep yourself informed instead of accusing others of spouting crapola? Or maybe everyone should take your word and stop trying to improve Linux because you "can take a Pentium 233mhz and turn it into a router running the newer kernels, and have it run like a hot damn"
Con Kolivas had been shouting from rooftops about slow desktop performance and was submitting feedback and bug reports. One of the kernel devs apparently said "I do not notice the issue on my quadcore machine with 4GB RAM". Rightly or wrongly, this lead Con to believe that the kernel devs do not care about desktop performance and only give priority to issues that big corporates complain about.
In the true open source style, he took upon himself to learn kernel programming and released a whole set of -CK patches and various versions of benchmarking tools and schedulers. On the other side, Ingo Molnar was the maintainer of the scheduler portion of the kernel and maintained that the O(1) scheduler(and the one before it?) is good enough and has no problems. Con conclusively started proving this wrong with his benchmarks. At this point, everyone assumed the -CK branch would be merged into the kernel at some point and Linus says he had been considering it.
At some point, Ingo starts making his own scheduler, which later evolved into the Completely Fair Scheduler. A number of posts claim that it was kind of rip off of the ideas behind Con's scheduler with which it was in a race to get included in the kernel. Then Linus decides to include CFS into the kernel instead of Con's scheduler. The reason he gave was that Con thought SD was perfect and that he ignored and flamed the users on the CK mailing list and that he(Linus) was far more comfortable working with Ingo since he knew him well. He also admitted that he might have formed this opinion on a single incident on the mailing list and he didn't have the time to follow the CK mailing list.
Some people on Con's side in the LKML tried to explain this by saying that the single incident was in response to a troll who submitted faulty bug reports and ignored the reasons for why they were rejected and that Linus was playing favorites. Con couldn't take the non-inclusion of -CK and plugsched(which would have given users a clean way of using a custom scheduler) and quit kernel development totally.
The latest twist in the story was reported on Slashdot here . The gist of it was that another hacker(Roman Zippel) was trying work on CFS. He had asked questions about what some parts of the code did, and also made some patches that considerably simplified the code and mathematically proved his patches made things better. In response, Ingo came out with a big patch that ripped out the code that was questioned and included Roman's Zippel's ideas(another rip off?) with hardly any discussion and a tangential acknowledgement of including his changes. Roman complained that talking in patches without explanation is detrimental to collaborative OSS development.
Your examples totally miss the point. The CPU scheduler is a *lot* more crucial to desktop performance than swap space, memory config etc. etc.
Have you even been keeping up with the whole CPU scheduler in the kernel issue that the article mentions?
The whole point is that the CPU scheduler is NOT modular and you cannot change its behavior by much by changing kernel options. Con(along with soemone else) made patches to make it modular, calling it plugsched, but it was nixed from getting into the kernel by Linus who said something on the lines of "The scheduler is not something you see frequent changes in."
Con wanted it because desktop users can easily plug his desktop-centric scheduler into the kernel. For a lot more details read here .
How is Microsoft holding free software innovation back? How is this Office Suite or Open Office more innovative than MS Office? Atleast they innovated the new Ribbons interface whereas OO seems to be stuck on cloning the older versions. The only better thing I've seen in OO was that it used a gzipped xml compared to the opaque binary files that MS Office uses, but this hardly matters for the business users out there.