From kragen@dnaco.net Fri Sep 11 13:13:59 1998 Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 13:13:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: clug cincinnati linux user group Subject: Re: nice linus interview saw at slashdot (the URL that is) In-Reply-To: <19980911025109.B23540@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1843 Status: O X-Status: On Fri, 11 Sep 1998, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Thus spoke James M. Carter: > > http://www.bootnet.com/youaskedforit/lip_linux_manifesto.html > > I don't know what the deal with the interview was. He was utterly *obsessed* > with Micro$oft related questions. The interviewer, I assume you mean. Presumably that's because he works for boot Magazine. > If nowhere else, it was clear here, that Linus, sadly, has no interest in > free software as a community. He is purely in it from a technical > standpoint... Let's review some of the things Linus said in that interview: boot: Will there be a time where Linux isn't available for free? Torvalds: No. boot: You say that very quickly. Torvalds: Yes. One of the reasons I say it quickly is I've been asked the question before and I also have made certain there is no way anybody can take the freeness away. I very strongly feel that it's a good thing and the copyright requires it. And when somebody sends me big patches, I don't ask them to assign the copyright over to me. So right now for example, the kernel itself has probably on the order of 50 or 100 copyright holders and the actual copyright license has always been the same. It's the GPL that requires that sources always be available. So in order to make a version of Linux that is not under that license, you have to get all those copyright holders to agree to the new license. The parts of the kernel that I own completely are significant, but they aren't enough to really make a good system. I did that consciously. I wanted to bind my own hands so that even if people don't trust me personally, they trust the fact that even if I wanted to turn commercial, I couldn't. [and earlier] Torvalds: Yes. When you're teaching about operating systems, you need to be able to show how things are done. And with Linux this is trivial because you have sources and you have no obligations put on you from those sources. Microsoft has given source licenses for NT to big universities. But in giving source licenses to NT they tend to require certain things. For example they require the students sign nondisclosure agreements. And while that is okay for a certain class of school, its not okay for a university that thinks it should allow people to also talk about what they have learned. So any serious university would not accept that kind of license. [and earlier] boot: You've got a full slate of global developers who are working on Linux. Why hasn't it developed into a state of chaos? Torvalds: It's a chaos that has some external constraints put on it. For example, the pure kernel has a copyright that says that whoever does Linux development doesn't need to go through me. If Microsoft wanted to, they could take Linux tomorrow, start development on it, and do it completely on their own. There's nothing to stop anybody from doing that. However, they are required to make all the changes available to everybody else. This "no ownership" idea means that the only entity that can really succeed in developing Linux is the entity that is trusted to do the right thing. And as it stands right now, I'm the only person/entity that has that degree of trust. And even if somebody thought I was doing a bad job (which is fairly rare) and that somebody decides that "I really want to fix this feature," there's a really big hurdle to convince everybody else that he CAN fix that feature. So we know from the article that Linus likes free software because: - the only entity that can succeed in developing Linux is the entity that is trusted to do the right thing; - no serious university would have their students study software that's not open-source; - it's available for free. He also says that he explicitly took steps to make sure Linux would always be open-source, and would never be taken over and made proprietary. This is inconsistent with your beliefs that Linus is "purely in it from a technical standpoint". Linus has made even more extreme pro-FS statements elsewhere. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker The sages do not believe that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself. -- Wang Yang-Ming